Making it go there: what is greige?

After our 11 week run of being out of town every weekend, I really wanted to spend our first weekend at home working on a low budget/high impact project on the house. I knew I wanted to paint our living room greige--a grayish beige or a beigish-gray. While our living room isn't massive, it has a bunch of nooks and crannies (now I can mark "nooks and crannies" off of my blog buzzword list) that we knew would take a ton of time and effort to paint. So I had to get this right.

We buy pretty much everything from Lowe's. Not only can husband make it there and back in 11 minutes flat (including shopping time), but we have good friends who work at Lowe's Corporate so I feel like I'm doing them a solid. So I went to Lowe's and picked out four shades of greige in satin samples. After slathering on swatches in several different spots in the living room, I couldn't commit.

I clearly wanted the swatch on the bottom right--Smoked Oyster by Valspar--to work, but look at how it sort of blends into the couch. I couldn't have a monochromatic living room. When I googled images of greige, every living room had a white couch (and there's no way I'm getting a white couch when we have a dirty pup). Finally, I came across a website that recommended reducing the color density on the paint. We went back to Lowe's to pick up Smoked Oyster at 75% and also blue and yellow samples (maybe I was wrong about greige??).

Ahh... much better. Smoked Oyster at 75% it is. And while I liked the blue and the yellow samples we picked, they just didn't feel like "us". Yellow works amazingly well in so many of these bungalows (trust us, we toured about 40 of them in our search for this house), but I don't know, it's just too cheery for me. The blue sample was not a loss--we'll more than likely paint our closet that color.

So bright and early, Saturday Oct 29 (it really annoys husband that I remember dates like I do), we bought three cans of eggshell Smoked Oyster at 75% paint. After prepping the living room (cleaning walls and baseboards, moving furniture, and not taping--a good trim brush works so much better than tape!), we went to work. About 10 minutes in, I started freaking out--this wasn't the right color at all. To be fair, I literally go through all 5 stages of loss and grieving every time we paint, questioning and hating the color I picked all the way up until all of the brushes are cleaned and the furniture is moved back to its rightful location. But do you see the difference below? The far right swatch barely looked different from the light tan color that our living room already was. I didn't want to spend all weekend painting to not see the difference... not to mention I had my heart set on greige.