Tips on How to Find the Perfect Gray Paint Color from Sherwin-Williams

My house was built in 2010, right when the dark browns and beige were super popular.  Everything in my house was beige, the walls, ceilings, tiles, carpet and finishes.  At first it didn’t bother me, but as we have been remodeling our house and adding more and more white and gray, the beige wall color was starting to clash. So I decided it was time to paint my walls gray (and my ceilings white) to give my house a nice updated feel.  What I didn’t realize is that gray can be a tricky color to pick, because not all grays are the same.  Some are cool, some are warm, some pull blue, some pull purple and some pull green or beige.  Plus there are a TON of different grays too.  So today I am going to share with you the process I went through to find the perfect gray for my house.

They have a lot of great grays, luckily I had my list because it could be overwhelming because there are so many different ones.

Here are the 6 colors that I wanted to try out:

My friends and family also shared with me some pictures of their house, unedited with natural light, so I could really see how they looked.  So here are a few of those pictures.

This is my parent’s garage with Repose Gray.

Here is my sister’s master bedroom suite with Repose Gray (her house is gorgeous!).

This is Worldly Gray.

This one is Agreeable Gray.

As you can tell all of the grays are amazing and seriously look good (so that made my choice even harder).  When it comes to picking a color it really depends on preference and what kind of look you are going for, if you want it to be subtle or dark or warm or cool.  When I was deciding what color I wanted, I have several factors that I kept in mind.

• Will it look good with my current decor (because no one wants to have to completely change everything when they paint).

• Will it look good in my whole house.  I have one of those houses that the main living areas are all connected because we have a large and open, two story entry way.  So the moment I started painting my downstairs, I would eventually have to bring up to my upstairs because there was no good stopping point.

• Will it look good with my flooring (we replaced a lot of things in the process but we didn’t do much to the flooring, so I wanted a color that looked good with my carpet and tiles down stairs).

There are a lot of other things to keep in mind too, like how gray do you want it to be or how dark or light and things like that.

So here is an example of what our house looked like before, the beige color that was on the walls and the ceilings.

So the first thing I did was took the paint cards and looked at them inside my house (they look a lot different than at the store).  I taped them onto the wall and then narrowed it down to two colors.  I decided that Agreeable Gray was a little too light and Mindful Gray was a little too dark.  So I headed back to Sherwin-Williams and picked up samples for Repose Gray and Worldly Gray.

While I was remodeling our bathroom, I put both of the paint samples on the wall and compared the two colors.  Repose Gray is on the left and Worldly Gray is on the right.  Repose Gray is definitely more of a cool gray and Worldly Gray is more of a warm color.  Even though the cool gray looked better in our bathroom, I decided that I wanted more of a warm gray that would work for the whole house (like I said before we have a lot of beige in our house).  Worldly gray is a great color for our house because it works with both warm and cool colors, which we have a lot of through out the house.

Once I finally made my decision on the color, I then headed back to the store and picked up several gallons of the of Emerald paint in a satin finish and of course in Worldly Gray.  I picked the Emerald because it is a high quality paint and it’s amazing.  It seriously goes on so smooth and covers so well.  Plus it is super easy to clean and it has stain blocking technology and is a paint and primer all in one.  I would definitely recommend getting the Emerald if you’re going to be painting your house any time soon.   Also I got the roller that is recommended to use with the Emerald paint (because you don’t want to get nice paint and then use a cheap roller on it).  There is a chart in stores to tell you what roller to get and what size, and of course a worker can help too.

And here is the after!  Doesn’t the Worldly Gray look amazing?!  I seriously love it because it’s a nice subtle gray, it doesn’t scream gray at you when you walk in the door.

Here it is next to the fun sofa table I built.

Here is my entry way, as you can see it’s goes up into the upstairs so I had to find something that would look good through out my whole house.

Here it is in my kitchen.