Gray paint makes me blue

I am thankful for many things, one being the $3 paint samples at Home Depot. I started to paint the baby's room a gray color called "Creek Bend" (I think?). and while I liked it, Stephen thought it was too dark for the furniture we wanted.

By the way, this is what happens when I have a paint brush instead of a roller- yes, I know, I'm 27 not 13.. don't judge me.


We have to be careful with these paint colors because the baby furniture is dark mahogany not white. If the baby furniture we liked wasn't such an ugly, stark white the wall paint color wouldn't be as big of an issue. Now, I have to worry about the paint color looking okay with the furniture (which has never been a problem in the other 7 rooms we've painted in this house). Ugh. So we ventured to Home Depot to get more paint rollers, tape and something to fix the toilet in the guest bedroom (that's a whole other story).
We looked at various shades of light gray. I don't like light gray. Most light grays look like a dingy white, or a have a blue/green undertone. I had to walk away from the paint swatches before I started to cry (yay hormones). We settled on a color called Cathedral Gray and bought a $3 sample... I'll go mess with that here in a bit. I'm still kinda bummed because I strongly dislike light gray and I don't think what I originally want to do will "pop" against the light gray, or look as good as they would have with the darker gray.

I don't think I want to paint a stripe anymore. I had to talk Stephen into the stripe and it looks like I might have to talk him out of the stripe. I think I would rather do something like this with dark gray instead of white (not the wainscot, just the rectangular trim):

Or make something out of MDF that gives this sort of feel:

I found Design a la Mod did a really neat headboard, and I thought I might be able to mimic it but in boxes to put on the wall above the crib:

I think if I could do something like the above to break up the light gray, I might be happier. Maybe I could paint an accent wall dark gray (one w/o furniture against it).

I'm sure I'll piece it together once I can find a gray I like. I broke away from typing this blog to paint a test box, and it actually doesn't look that icky. Maybe we found a winner?