Picking the wrong colour paint

After several hours at the weekend spent in Homebase and much deliberating, we had finally agreed on the colour of paint for a master bedroom. With the house renovations into their second year and only having temporary bedroom space up until now getting our master bedroom perfect is an exciting challenge and choosing the paint colour is very important. With colour guide books with the paint's in use and rows of tins in front of us we narrow down the choices and there was a clear winner for our paint. We chose to use Homebase Home Of Colour in a shade called 'Cosy Mocha' The colour in the guide book looked a nice neutral grey. The colour on the tin was a nice neutral grey, the colour on the website was also a nice neutral grey. 

Image from http://www.homebase.co.uk/

But after painting just one wall this pink tinged wall was staring back at me and i hated it. Calling in my other half to get his opinion he immediately hated it too and the decision to repaint it was easily decided. The problem is we have gloss cream wardrobe doors on order and a pink/grey wall is not the neutral natural colour we chose to go with them. 

I understand that different paints can look different colours in different shades of light so we tried looking at the wall with the light off in just natural light. We even changed the light bulb to a white light rather than a warm light but there was no getting away from the fact that this colour had to many tones of pink in the paint that we just didn't want.

Rather than agreeing on another colour in the shop we decided we would actually buy some test pots this time to sample the colours in the room to avoid making the same mistake again. Although we maybe should have done this in the first place we had managed to get the paint colours correct first time on the whole of the downstairs of the house and thought the luck might continue upstairs.

Now that we had seen how awful this colour was we even started to think out of the box slightly more and get some samples of colours that we hadn't even contemplated before and even opted for a green! The green looked lovely on the tin and were really tempted to just go for it and buy it there and then, but once bitten, twice as shy. We were glad we got the sample on the wall as it dried a lot darker than the sample on the tin suggested and very swiftly decided against it.

Image from http://www.homebase.co.uk/

With samples all coming up differently to what was on the tins we ended up choosing the colour 'Barely Haze' which was actually our wildcard choice, this was the colour neither of us really liked in the shop but thought we would take a punt on and as an outside choice that we both knew wouldn't work. As the colours were coming up so differently to what was on the tins 'Barely Haze' turned out to be the neutral colour that we were looking for.

The colour looked like it would work well with the sample from the gloss doors as well as the wallpaper choice for the insides of the wardrobes. so the following day it was back to Homebase to take the pink paint back and exchange for our new colour choice before screaming back and cracking on with the painting to finally make the most of the long weekend working on the house.