Oddly enough, the winning favorite color in our house has always been the teal in the studio – As tallied from the mouths of our guests, at least…Ever since painting the room in a deep, rich teal (Olympic paint’s “Teal Zeal”) I’ve been unsure. After years of apartment living on my own where I wasn’t allowed to paint the walls, I suppose I decided to go a little wild in our home. Having free reign to paint as I would apparently gave me a little too much confidence. Frankly, having lived with “Teal Zeal” for almost a year now, even despite the resounding positive comments I received from visitors, I just couldn’t love it like I should. It was just too dark and too bold – It needed to be toned down. Sorry Team-Teal!!!
When choosing a new color, I decided to go with the same family just in a much more muted hue – In came Valspar’s “Icy Mint.” It’s a beautiful, soft, milky mint color with the perfect amount of pizzaz. I have always been a faithful and loyal customer to Lowe’s brand of paint, Olympic – But I decided to mix things up this time and went with Valspar. I was actually REALLY impressed. “Teal Zeal” is a pretty ominous color when faced with the challenge of covering with a new paler option, but “Icy Mint” went on like a dream, covering up the majority of the old color in only one coat. A second and final coat later and we were DONE!
The transformation is stunning, at least to me, and I am finally excited to work and rest in this space.
Without further adieu…Meet “Icy Mint”!
As you can see, we decided to leave the black wall – I am still loving the rocker feel and think it’s the perfect balance to the cool mint. It sort of acts as a disclaimer that this is NOT a nursery since “Icy Mint” could read a bit “baby.” If and when we do start a family, we could always paint over the black with more “Icy Mint,” or maybe we could do a fun stencil over top to keep the pop of black showing through. We’ll see!
As for the desk area, this is still a work in progress. In the original “Teal Zeal” configuration I had a set of two dark brown upper shelves in place over the desk (if you scroll to the beginning of this post, you’ll see them) – They stored mostly books and little figurines and photos. I decided to nix the old bracket shelves and will replace them this weekend with new Ikea Ekby shelves and hardware. I think the aluminum fixin’s and white surface will be unobtrusive against the pale wall color and won’t crowd or weight down the wall above my computer. I want that particular area to fill relaxed and soothing, so I’m excited to see how the new display will look.
And now for a quick reminder of what the space looked like “before”:
And “after”:
One of the most exciting changes I’ve made to the house so far…What do you guys think?? I can’t get enough of spending time in the room now – I think that’s a sure sign that I’ve finally hit the mark.
