Painting The Bedroom Ceiling A Soft Green Color
Those of you who follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter may have tried to solve the mystery of why we slept in the guest bedroom for a few nights last weekend. Well… (drumroll? trumpets? cow bell?)… we painted the ceiling in the master bedroom. Yeeehaw!
One of our go-to things about blogging about our adventures in home improvement is that we are still totally learning as we go. By no means have we cracked all the decorating codes, and we simply enjoy when we make some groundbreaking-to-us discovery along the way that we get to share with you folks. Well, this is one of those times.
After three years of loving Glidden’s Gentle Tide on the walls of our bedroom (it is the only room we did not paint at least twice to get it right) we suddenly realized that our white crown molding paired with our white ceilings were sort of yawn. The whole room felt polished and luxe thanks to billowy floor to ceiling curtains, breezy blue tones, and crisp white trim… but the boring white ceiling made it feel like we had neglected the fifth wall in the space- and it certainly did not do anything to accent the crown molding that we introduced a while back for a bit more interest and architecture.
Nope, we were certainly not playing up all of our rooms positives, but that is nothing that two $7 quarts of paint could not solve. First we taped up some paint chips on the ceiling and studied them at all times of the day to figure out which one we liked best. Taping them to the ceiling is a especially essential step (as opposed to simply holding the swatch up against the wall) because light hits that plane of the room in a totally distinct way (something that looks especially light against the wall might look mega dark on the ceiling or vice versa). Once we had them all in place it was straightforward to see which swatches were too purple, too gray, too dark, too weird, and juuuust right.
We settled on the swatch at the end because it felt like a lighter version of the color on the wall with a bit of fresh celery worked in. We could have had the paint folks mix up a tint that was exactly the wall color with a bit more white in it (for an nearly-guaranteed-victory) but we jumped at the chance to add a bit of soft interest by choosing a swatch with a bit more green in it to layer in more beachy blue-green without hitting anyone over the head. It simply felt a bit fresher and subtly exciting (you cannot see much of the green in this shot but it is more apparent in the next pic).
So fourteen dollars later we got to work with our two quarts of flat paint. What color was it? Glidden’s Cool Cucumber. A vivid especially soft green simply like the inside of a cucumber (the swatch in fact does not look blue at all, but taped up in our blue room it picked up some of those soft tones for a vivid effect). And why two quarts? We hate to pay $20 to store a large gallon of paint when we only need about half of it, and it is only around $14 for two quarts which we knew would cover well sufficient and leave us with some touch up paint that we could easily store (since it is about a fourth of the size of a big gallon). Why flat paint? It hides more imperfections than eggshell or semi-gloss options, and for surfaces like a ceiling it is pleasant to play those down with something that looks smooth and seamless. Here is John getting his roll on (he’s the roller in the family while I am the resident cutter-inner):
The moment we had even a smidge of paint on the ceiling we immediately knew we were doing the right thing. The crown molding went from “I will simply sit here in the back of the class and act invisible” to “Oooh, I know the answer to that complicated math problem so I will shout ‘pick me pick me’ and flail my arm around.”
And these photos truly do not do the serene green color any justice whatsoever. It is like the softest piece of sea glass that got battered by waves for years and only has a hint of celery green left to show for it. And it goes so perfectly with our greeny-gray-blue walls that we are still congratulating ourselves for stepping a bit out of our comfort zone (instead of adding 50% more white to the Gentle Tide formula and calling it a day). It by no means shouts “green ceiling” but it adds to a layered look instead of something especially matchy-matchy and we enjoy that it is not so especially coordinated and it looks a bit more interesting and dimensional. Plus it truly plays up the crown molding since we no longer have the white on white thing going on.
Most of all we enjoy that we lost that blinding white ceiling but the room still feels airy and open. The ceilings in fact feel higher since the especially white paint made them more apparent (which made them feel closer) while the soft celery tone makes them feel a bit more like they recede into the sky.
And the way that the light of the capiz chandelier bounces around the ceiling truly makes the room feel like it is glowing- like the shiny part of a sea shell or the inside of a limesicle. It truly is cool and refreshing yet warm and enveloping. And although this last picture does not do a strong job of demonstrating it, the crown molding truly does rise to meet us every morning, noon and night (check out the picture above this one for a better demonstration).
So that is what we did last weekend in under three hours with less than fifteen bucks. And the reason we slept in the guest bedroom? Even though Glidden is naturally fairly low in VOCs, we consistently try to limit our exposure to paint since we use it so frequently, so sleeping in the guest bedroom for a few nights while we kept the windows open and a fan going in the master bedroom allowed us to appreciate another bedroom in our house. And tempt us to paint that ceiling as well. In fact I am now dying to paint the ceilings in both of our guest bedrooms along with our living room and sunroom so stay tuned to see which one we attack next- and what color we choose.
Oh and let us know if you’ve had any decorating-related lightbulb moments lately. We never would have thought to paint our ceilings anything other than crisp clean white a few months ago, and we are itching to know what sort of lively discoveries you folks are making on the home front. Do tell.
