Spoiled for Choice

First of all: the blog posts have been lacking this week because the computer decided to act up and suggest that it was ready and primed for hard drive failure. Scary thought. Thankfully, we have it working again for the time being, so I can save my pictures and blog for a bit as I set out to embark upon my next big DIY project.

The chairs in our dining room set are fine. There, I've said it: there's not really anything wrong with them that necessitates this project. I just felt like it. Between our huge 8-foot-long table and the wood laminate floors and the chairs, though, we have quite a lot of wood tones happening in this room. And I'd like to break up the monotony a bit. So, I've decided to paint the chairs.

First step? Colour choice. This, honestly, feels like the hardest part. I've painted wooden furniture before, so I know the drill, basically. And I even have nicer tools this time around (read: proper sandpaper and a nice paintbrush). But picking a colour that we both agree on and that goes in the room...that was difficult.

Here are the 9 colours we'd narrowed my original selection down to. The people in the paint section at B&Q must really be tired of me coming in and decimating the Valspar paint chips display. Pretty soon, I'll have the whole collection of all the colours I'd conceivably want just sitting somewhere in my house. I should catalogue them.

After getting the above picture edited in GIMP to get a rough idea of what the paint colours would look like in the context of our room (the colours are all as they appear on Valspar's UK website), I sat down with the Husband and we had a bit of a think about which colours we liked the best. Left to my own devices, I might have picked Sun Drops or Mango for Breakfast - one of the yellow colours. But the Husband didn't like the yellows. I think they're a bit too garish for his taste. That's an important point in all of these projects I embark upon: I always run my ideas past the Husband first. Our tastes are generally similar enough that he's a good sounding board for ideas I'm not sure about. Plus, it's just common courtesy to make sure that the changes I make are things he'll be able to live with, since - you know - he has to live with them, too.

In the end, we'd talked ourselves down to two different colours with two very different feels: Red Envelope and Tea Cosy. It's worth noting that those colours look a bit different in real life. After holding them up all around the room and agonizing over the decision for a few days, we finally decided that Tea Cosy was the way to go. You'll see what it looks like soon once I get to start sanding, priming, and painting the chairs this week. Wish me luck: this is my biggest project yet.