Lady Gray

I like gray, but it doesn’t always like me.

It’s just not fair. I see gray walls, cupboards, and furniture everywhere, and they look so pretty. So last week I picked up a sample pot of Martha Stewart “Fossil” paint (a pretty pale gray/green color on the paint chip), and painted a swathe on my front room walls.

Bleaaahhhh.

Yes, it’s really that bad. I just can’t pick ‘em.

Let me interrupt myself here to say that on the positive side, this is the first time I was SMART enough to buy a sample pot. I still have about 2 gallons of paint left from my last painting disaster!

However, I’ve *really* wanted to try painting a piece of furniture gray again. My last try was a disaster, and I ended up with blue instead. But I was ready to give it a shot again on this $15 DI piece I picked up a few weeks ago:

As luck would have it, I happened to have part of an “oops” quart of gray paint leftover from last summer. It was getting old and rather thick, and there wasn’t much left anyway. So I dumped in a healthy dollop of creamy white, a fair amount of water, and mixed it all up.

I loved this color. It was gray, but not a “cool” gray…a healthy hint of brown made it a warm color. In the twilight, it looked almost taupe. Gorgeous.

I didn’t want to alter the color too much, so I glazed very lightly with black. Mostly I just hit the edges and the indentations on the cupboard doors.

The pulls are the ones it came with, but they are not original to the piece. In fact, if you look at the “before” picture above, you can see where extra holes were drilled for this “new” hardware.