The Hibiscus Incident of 2010

I've been waiting to post pictures of the dream house but its not ready yet. The Hibiscus incident part of the reason why. I spent the last couple of months agonizing over paint colors for the house. Ah-gooo-ni-zing, literally.

I didn't want to go circus style and pick too many colors and I felt even more confident in that choice once the Hubs hit up the ever so helpful Young House Love blog.

In the end I landed on a common color for 5ish rooms to coordinate with the other colors I'd selected. The dining room and kitchen/sunroom  plus the 2 bedrooms and bathroom upstairs were going to be a lovely Benjamin Moore shade called Pale Sea Mist.

Then I waffled. I made one last visit to the paint store the afternoon before purchasing and decided to go with Hibiscus instead of Pale Sea Mist based solely on the paint sample. We bought 5 gallons of Hibiscus that night.

That night we started painting in the dining room and it was scary. From the very first brush strokes I was totally intimidated by my paint selection. Alas, we forged on. On into the kitchen/sunroom. On to second coats in all rooms. And finally, on to bed.  Everyone knows that the color will dry darker and that you have check the color in different light throughout the day, right?

Morning came. It was awful. It was as if someone had painstakingly colored every inch of every wall in those two (or 3) rooms in yellow highlighter. Hibiscus was most definitely not the the bright, cheery green I had hoped for. It was something totally different and worse than I'd imagined. 

Two things happened immediately, well three things, I made coffee. Then I sent the hubs back to the paint store for samples of the color I had originally selected. And I texted the neighbors to come over for an immediate consult.

The consensus of me, the hubs and the neighbors was that although a bold and lovely color for some room out there, not for my room and not when the picture in my head was more celery and less scorching sun. This is an admittedly terrible photo but it shows the vast difference of Hibiscus vs. Pale Sea Mist.

The good news is that the hubs is a Saint and the repainting was complete the very next day. Order has been restored and Hibiscus has been healed to a lovely turquoise lovingly called "Seabiscus" thanks to several re-tinting efforts at the paint store.