Foyer and Powder Room Paint Colors

I am very excited to share that we have finally picked paint colors for the foyer and powder room! If you remember way back when we had someone out to help us pick colors for the house and while I was happy about our choices for the main living areas, the colors fell short for the foyer. They were all too light and too beige for my taste.

So I dug through some of the paint swatches I collected (yes there are so many it's officially a collection) and found a few that H and I both liked. We narrowed it down to three choices:

Nimbus,Smoke Embers, and Revere Pewter

I was really thinking Revere Pewter was going to be the winning color. I have seen it all over Pinterest and we were even considering it for our main living spaces. But instead of just jumping into buying however many gallons of paint, we decided it might be wise to get samples this time around. We plan to have a professional paint our two story foyer so we figured it would be worth the $15-20 investment to be sure we loved the color before putting it on the walls. 

(Top to bottom) RP, Nimbus, SE

Much to our surprise, we really disliked Revere Pewter! So glad we bought that little test pot! We didn't like it mainly because in our space it was way too tan/beige instead of that nice greige color we were hoping for. I refuse to have any wall in our house be tan so we nixed the one color we thought would be perfect.

We also thought that Smoke Embers was way too dark and too blue. It was very similar to the dining room color Anonymous by Behr. We also painted the front room this color because we loved it so much. But painting the whole foyer would be a bit much. 

That left us with Nimbus. While we were putting it on the wall, H and I were both surprised with how nice of a color it was. Light enough to not be overpowering but also dark enough to feel like there is a color on the wall. It has a nice greenish/blue tint to it which, surprisingly, I liked. I think it works well with our hardwood stairs and bonus that it is more of a grey than tan : )

We figured since we were having someone come in to paint the foyer we might has well have them do the powder room too. Then the entire first floor would be painted meeting my soft deadline of 'finish painting the downstairs before my birthday' I made up at the beginning of the year. 

For those who have done DIY paint jobs in your own houses, you know that the small rooms are sometimes more of a pain than the big ones. By having the painter do it just takes the stress off of us and we are only going to be out an extra $100 bucks (including paint which is really closer to $50). This is one for the win column. 

For this room we decided to do something totally different - a dark purple/grey color. Why you ask? Well, I originally wanted to wallpaper this room just to do something fun and dramatic. But ever since I started Googling powder rooms for ideas, I have seriously loved the dark, dramatic spaces with a few glamorous details. Hence, dark purple. We are going with Silhouette by Benjamin Moore and praying it turns out the way we want it to. I know it's going to be really dark at first, but once we add some white canvas prints or frames, and a new, larger mirror, I think it will all work out. Fingers crossed!

So that's all for now. We haven't set a date for the painter to come but should be within the next two weeks or so. Be sure to check back for updates!

JP