How many perfectionists does it take...

to find the right paint color? Answer: two, plus a whole lot of trial and error, and some white paint.

The bedroom started off as the same gender-neutral-pastel-baby-yellow as the kitchen, and while it was far from offensive, it wasn't jiving with our vision for the apartment. We were going for calm, soothing, ethereal and natural, and the yellow was screaming, "Dingy buttercups!" and "Sad Easter!"

While we knew we wanted to get rid of the yellow here, too, we also knew it could be quite a challenge. One thing Kate and I diverge on is color; I like a lot of it, and if it were up to Kate, everything would be white, beige, or cream. We were worried we wouldn't be able to compromise, and it certainly took some doing (read: studying almost 100 paint chips and buying about 10 samples - ouch to the wallets! - before finally custom mixing our own color), but we did it!

It's crazy how different paint can look once it's actually on the wall (who would have known that Benjamin Moore's 'Pampas Grass' and 'Bride to Be' which read as soft, greyish tans with just a hint of pink would look like bubble-gum or little-girl nursery pink out of the can?). 

One Friday night we painted six sample colors on foam-core boards and came away not liking any of them. Of course we failed to take into account that, without any natural sunlight, we were only seeing them in the glow of the awful fluorescent lighting in the bedroom (which is high on the list of things to get rid of, thank you very much), or that we were both cranky and tired and probably nothing would have looked right to us at the time.

One of the colors we had tried that night is called 'Cedar Key,' also a Ben Moore color. And after a restorative weekend on Long Island, in the light of day and in much better moods, we realized that we actually really liked it:

But it was too dark for our tiny bedroom, especially since colors tend to look even darker on a larger scale, i.e. anything bigger than a paint chip.

Our solution? Custom! That seems to be our favorite word for this apartment with its limited space, not-quite-square corners, and our very picky (or, as we like to say, refined) taste. We mixed our sample of Cedar Key with some pure white paint, which lightened it quite a bit, and then painted our new sample on a clean board of foam core. The nice, patient paint guys at Pintchick then photographed our sample and custom mixed our paint.

The painting process itself was pretty nerve-racking. We naively didn't think we'd need a primer, so when the first coat went on, the dingy yellow was still shining through, making for quite an interesting (unpleasant) color. We were both terrified that we'd made a wrong color choice, but after another coat, we realized what had happened and really fell in love with the color.

Mia, ever the curious cat and home-improvement helper, wanted to get her paws on the color, too!

It might be slightly lighter than anything I would have chosen on my own, but then again, my tendency can be to err on the side of too much color which I grow sick of more easily, and this color feels timeless, sophisticated and calming. Plus, it was a compromise for Kate, too, who might have chosen something even lighter left to her own devices, and in the end, I love that this is something we chose together.