Painting the Big Wall

Painting in the studio is now complete (minus the staircase walls which still need bead board attached).  When deciding upon paint color for the room, we decided upon a light color for most of the walls.  Although Jen would paint every wall in the house a dark chocolate brown if she could, because the studio doesn't have ample windows and lighting for something like this, we settled for a beige color (almost white) on the walls and painted the dormers and the big accent wall chocolate browns!

The dormers ended up being a VERY dark brown, but this definitely helped to accentuate the fun angles of the attic itself.  Jen knew, however, that this brown was WAY too dark for the big accent wall.  So, she got creative -- she found a mistinted pint of tan paint at the local paint department and decided to mix this with the leftover paint from the dormers.  It ended up being a perfectly coordinated, yet lighter brown!

the mistinted color that was going to find a place in our home

At $3.50, this saved us quite a bit -- we didn't have to buy another $25 gallon of paint and didn't waste all the paint we bought for the dormers!

We first saved some of the dormer paint in one of those empty paint cans you can buy (so that if we need to do any touch ups and such, we still have the matching paint!)

A key note to this type of paint-mixing method (that Jen wouldn't have thought of without the brilliant mind of Graham) -- put the lighter paint in first and mix in the darker paint -- it is a lot easier to darken light paint than it is to lighten dark paint!

So, the light, mistinted paint was in the storage container and ready to be "tinted"

We thought that we would only need a little of the dark paint, but after the first pour, the mixed color was way too light:

We eventually ended up using all of the dark paint (just over a half gallon) to mix in with the tan paint.  The result?  Jen's favorite, CUSTOM, paint color:

Jen was really excited to get the paint on the walls!

In this picture you can see both the dormer and accent wall colors!

You may be wondering, "how did you paint that big wall over the staircase since the ceiling is 10 feet high?"  Well, maybe these pictures help explain Graham's decided method:

Although it looks like there is something supporting the front of the ladder, there really isn't -- that is just the staircase below!

and yes, Graham is painting in his bare feet (makes it that much more safe)

In the end, we had just enough of the new color leftover from the gallon we created to save for future touch ups -- perfect!