it's all in the way you look at it

Well, no, it's not.


Since we purchased this home, we've learned a great deal about lighting. More than any other material, paint changes from light to light. And we're not just talking daylight to nightlight. We mean that paints can practically jump colors from location to location.


Mom Hawk paints a lot. A lot. Her house, her friends' houses, and now her family's houses. So she knows a heck of a lot about looking into the light. When we were trying to decide which color white to choose for our ceilings and trim, we thought it would be a cinch. She had some extra trim paint from her house, so she brought it over and began to paint one corner of the ceiling. When Jen returned, WOW. It looked yellow. Not white, yellow. And yet in her home, it pops a bright white!


Our favorite youngsters, Sherry and John, were the first non-family members to give us an idea of how important it is to see paint chips throughout the day, at the angle you'll paint them. So if you're painting on the ceiling, you have to tape it to the ceiling:

younghouselove

So one Friday afternoon, Mom Hawk and I (jen) grabbed up all the white paint chips (a.k.a. color stack) from the paint stores and ran around the house in different lights trying to figure it out. We chose a very happy, clean, muted, eggshell sort of white: Alabaster from Sherwin Williams. We also took her advice and grabbed the semi-gloss version (also what YHL discovered after a few tries).


Remember a few weeks back we mentioned how the green room was transforming here? And how I matched the wall? 

Remember how we complained about this light?

Yuck yuck yuck!

And it made our green room look like this?

Drumroll, please....look what a distortion it causes compared to natural light!

That natural light shot has not been adjusted in any way other than to add our tag. Here's another angle:

And the natural reveal!

Crazy, isn't it? I find that with that nasty light, we rarely enter the Green Room. But in the daytime (when we're home during the day) we keep ducking in to take a look because it's so light and inviting.

And it isn't just about taking a photo during the day vs. night. It's really just a bad light! So to eliminate any further issues when we change it out, we plan to purchase a few, test them, test different light bulbs in them, and only then make a real decision.

Thank you for being patient with our lack of posting this week! We're back in full swing.

icj,

~j

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