Fun with Sherwin Williams Color Visualizer

One of the most challenging aspects in planning for our new house, for me, has been deciding on our colors. It was never a strong point before my TBI, and it's a lot harder and slower now. The Sherwin-Williams Color Visualizer has been a great help. (Other paint companies have their own visualizers, but I've used SW because we knew all along that we would be using their no VOC paint).

You can either use one of their stock photos for different rooms (very helpful when our home was only an idea), or upload your own (much better once the walls are primed). I haven't used the site since we decided on our colors a few weeks ago, but yesterday, Niels and I were in the house at different times and both were struck with the same thought that our great room wasn't quite right.

The hearth is still covered. It's concrete on top, and the bottom will be painted white as well.

The fireplace has been really hard for me to visualize and if you've been following along, you can read about how we've struggled with the design. Our surround inspiration finally came from another Charis home.

We love the clean white lines of the wood and hope that by not using tile, it will sustain a timeless look.

We are really happy with how the fireplace turned out, especially with our electric fireplace insert.

I think the inspiration fireplace works because they have the accent wall to bring out the white. However in our great room, something still seemed off, even with the trim piece we put above the fireplace.

We have white trim in the windows and on the baseboards, but other wood accents are stained espresso, like the stair cap, foyer niche bench, mudroom lockers and of course, the kitchen.

The stair rail is stained espresso with white trim underneath.

It's hard to see in this picture, but the molding of the kitchen cabinets matches the molding of our fireplace.

This picture was obviously taken before painting, but shows how the great room is  open into the kitchen.

As Niels and I talked about it last night, we both think the solution to tie everything together is to stain the mantle. This is where the color visualizer helped us decide that the cost of redoing the mantle is worth it.

Mantle as is

Colorized stained mantle.

Fireplace and stair cap as is.

Colorized stained fireplace and stair cap.

Now to tell Todd...

Color Selection

This is a bit of slow season in our build as the electrical/plumbing/HVAC finishes up. There's been a little bit of insulation blown in and then we're see the drywall going up. At the point, our house will really start to look like a home.

We've handed off our flooring selections, and the folks from Charis will do a little research so see if we can get the costs in line with our allowance. 

The other big batch of decisions we made this week was selecting the colors for our soon-to-be walls. Sue, from Charis, came over with her big book of Sherwin Williams color swatches and we got to work. Our allowance is for six colors, though we could always pay more for additional colors if we wanted them. Our current house has five colors (mostly one outside the bedrooms), so we figured six was plenty.

In our current house, our base color is what I call "chocolate milkshake." When we put in on almost 5 years ago, it really reminded me of a Wendy's Frosty. But as we've been looking at models and watching HGTV, we've been won over by gray as the new neutral. It works with our modern bent and our steel appliances and fixtures, so we think it will look nice. 

Thanks to the Sherwin Williams Color Visualizer, we're able to get a large scale sense of how the colors will look.

We'll use the darker gray as the base on the first floor for the kitchen, great room, dinette (maybe, see below), foyer, mudroom, office and maybe in-law bath (if we don't go with the room color). We'll  use the lighter gray upstairs in the guest bedroom, hallway and our bath, with a transitional treatment using both hues on the stairway. 

SW Classic French Gray

SW Light French Gray

The next decision was the in-law suite. We knew that it would be the same (or Sherwin Williams equivalent) or our current master bedroom colors, which is sage green and chocolate. I was happy to keep those colors (since we have all the accent decor) for our new master until my awesome hubby said we could use plum: my most favorite color! So here's the color for the in-law suite (and laundry room)

SW Dried Thyme

So, our room will be this pretty plum color! Our wedding colors were platinum and plum, so of course, I love that subtle reminder in our bedroom. What can I say, my husband is the greatest!

SW Expressive Plum

Just for giggles, I did this rendering for the dining room. It looks a lot richer/deeper than the rendering of our bedroom. Interesting. Our dinette will be very bright because it has windows on all three sides (and open on the fourth), so I think we could play with a darker color if we wanted to be crazy with it.

SW Expressive Plum

Our 2.5-year-old son's favorite color, for quite some time has been yellow. When we asked him what color he wanted his new room to be, he has quite consistently requested yellow. However, yellow is not really the calm nap/deep sleeping-inducing color we have in mind, so we're sticking with blue like he has in his nursery, but more of a "big boy blue. We saw this particular color in another Charis home and we feel in love with it.

SW Bracing Blue

So that leaves one last color. We had to decide between the vibrant orange Dutch bathroom I put off in our current house because we needed to be neutral or yellow for our amber-obsessed son. After looking at pictures of my Dutch decor, we decided that the yellow would work, so this is the yellow for our powder room and D's bath. The power room will have orange tulips for accents, and D's room will have blue accents.

SW Bee's Wax.

We made all these selections in our home, at night, under warm lights. Sue, our interior designer, is ordering larger samples that we'll bring to the new house to view with natural light. If needed we can adjust the tones.

I can't wait to see it all come together!