Pale Oak for the Win

If you saw my post last week, you know that Tyler and I officially PICKED PAINT FOR THE LIVING ROOM. Whoohoo! We picked a color we had never seen and simply crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. Rebels. :) Thanks to the buy one get one free deal at Ace Hardware, we were able to get two gallons of Clark + Kensington paint and primer in one for just over $30. That's a great deal for quality paint, so I figured it was worth the color gamble.

Luckily, Ace Hardware happens to sell Benjamin Moore paint too, so we weren't limited in our color options. I went in with a few samples in mind, but after just a few minutes, Tyler and I quickly agreed that we needed to search for something completely new. We wanted to lighten and brighten the room, but nothing with blue or yellow undertones was going to work. I ended up pulling out the color samples of paint we already have around our house - BM White Dove and BM Revere Pewter. Since these colors were already favorites in our house, it seemed logical to consider options within this spectrum. Revere Pewter is much darker than we wanted for the living room, so we focused on White Dove. White Dove happened to be the lightest color on the swatch, so we jumped to the darkest color - BM Pale Oak. Tyler and I looked at each other, shrugged, and decided we might as well give it a try.

For reference, here's how it compared to the other two paint samples I showed a few weeks ago.

Left - Pale Oak //  Middle - Revere Pewter  //  Right - Montpelier Madison White

Can you believe how blue the one on the right looks? I guess Tyler was right. It looks so icy compared to the other two. Glad we didn't go that route!

Well a few hours of painting later, and I LOVE it. It's exactly the color I've been searching for for months. Years! Pale Oak, you may have restored my sanity. It's tough to photograph paint, but here are a few "after" shots around the room.

Here's a decent comparison of the new paint in the living room to the old paint in the dining room. We may repaint the dining room Pale Oak at some point.... Don't tell Tyler.