That time we accidentally painted our bedroom pastel blue... alternatively, Passive Gray from Sherwin- Williams is NOT gray

We had been talking about painting our bedroom for a long time. Our home is now 13 years old and our bedroom hadn't been painted by us until this month. Prior to this paint job, our master bedroom was the last room in the house to be painted from the original color (beige) that the builder painted in all of the rooms. The biggest obstacle was that the room has vaulted ceilings so we knew that painting it would be more of a challenge. Also, it's a big room. Also, painting kind of stinks (literally and figuratively) and sometimes (or 98% of the time for me) laziness/ lassitude is more appealing than working on something.

Then we finally bit the bullet on getting new carpeting in the two bedrooms that had carpet and knew that it would be foolish to not paint before the new carpet was installed.

Sooooooooo, we embarked on the painting project. First and foremost was selecting a paint color. We chose Passive Gray from Sherwin Williams. It was a light gray color... until we painted it on our walls. And then it became light blue, almost a pastel shade of blue. We could have started over when we saw what it looked it on our walls. But, we'd purchased five gallons of it and didn't want to waste it. Plus, before we took the tape off of the baseboards and ceiling, I did some online research about the color Passive from Sherwin Williams. I found an article by a homeowner who described exactly what we experienced with the paint color: she was appalled by how blue it looked (like us, she was expecting gray) on her walls when first painted. However, she said that after she removed the tape, the wall color looked gray, and not blue. I was thrilled to read that article since we still had the tape on our baseboards. I expected to remove the tape and enjoy looking at gray walls. Unfortunately, removing the tape did little, if anything, to dispel the blueness of the walls. I wish I'd never read that article. It had gotten my hopes up that we'd have gray looking walls after all. Now, the only way we are going to have gray walls is if we paint the walls AN ACTUAL GRAY COLOR!!

Two days after we finished painting our room gray blue, we had new carpet installed in our bedroom. The whole bedroom wall color situation has been mollified by the new carpet. Because our old carpet was so horrific and appalling looking, I'm now more focused on how great the new carpet looks in the room. The wall color is a bit unfortunate but the new carpet is better than the paint color is awful, if that makes sense.

Want to see some blue walls?

How about seeing some gray paint first? Here is the paint color Passive being poured into the liner tray. So far so gray, right?

The wall that is displayed in the picture below had already been painted Passive. What?? How on earth does paint go from gray in the can to blue on a wall? I know not.

Half Passive/ half builder beige

 In some lights, it kind of looks gray...

… and then in some lights it looks like we could be setting up a nursery for quadruplet boys.

I've become a little obsessed with how different the color looks in different lights and against different backgrounds (I'm resisting the temptation to post all of the pictures I took of the color sample). Against our couch, the color looks like a nice blue gray.

Then I turned my back and took a picture of the color sample against a white piece of paper. The light was nearly exactly the same (I took the pictures within 30 seconds of each other so they were taken at the same time of day but in the picture with the couch, there was a window just above the couch). The picture below looks more gray to me, almost a greenish gray? I'd never suspect that the color would look blue on our walls. 

This has nothing to do with wall color gone wrong but rather with the new carpet that we had installed. Below is a picture of the stairs with the new carpeting. I took a picture of the old carpet on the stairs and it's almost embarrassing in how bad it looks. Instead of posting a picture of it, I'll relay what the carpet installer said when he came to the house to install the carpet. He took one look at the stairs with the old carpet and said, "Oh, wow, you guys do need new carpet!" Yep.

Here is the new carpet in the bedroom. It looks so good!!