Gray Squirrel and Bright White

There were a few factors that went into choosing the paint color for the laundry room--1. Does it work well with the other colors in our home? 2. Does it match the tile flooring that we're keeping for now? 3.  How will it look in a windowless room?

Luckily, I had a chunk of tile from the baseboards we ripped out to bring with me on my paint swatch hunt.  I grabbed 20 or so blue, gray and brown swatches that could work with the tile.  In the end, Martha Stewart's Gray Squirrel was almost a perfect match to the brownish-gray (like a squirrel!) specks in the tile.  Since we have similar tones in our house (Martha's Zinc in the family room and Mushroom in our bedroom) it checked numbers 1 and 2 off our must-have list for the paint color. 

As for the third criteria--How will it look in a windowless room?--it had potential to become cave-like.  But since our laundry room has a weird built-in shelf on the far wall, the plan became to carry the molding throughout the rest of the room so it looked less weird.  Since we were already planning on dividing the wall with molding, painting the top half bright white became the solution to avoid the cave look.

After I got the room taped off, Chris tackled the top half, while I got squirrelly on the bottom half.  As soon as the white got rolled on, I knew we made the right choice.  It instantly felt fresh and modern.

Here's how the rest of the two-toned room looks now:

There's a long list of things that I would love to tell you to ignore right now, because things are still rough in here, but for two days work--we're stoked with the progress! As for the molding--I guess we'll call it a chair rail, even though it is much higher than a chair rail--we decided on a slightly more narrow version of the tall and simple baseboards that we'll be installing to keep things looking fresh and modern.

And art.  Ahhh, art will do wonders in here on those gallery-esque white walls.

I'm getting ahead of myself.  Today's project is updating the dark and dingy grout in the tile to match those aforementioned white walls and slipping into party mode for Chris's birthday tomorrow.  I love his birthday more than my own!

Make it a happy weekend, friends.  What's on your list?