We spent two days trying to get the right touch up paint for our walls as we need to fill nail holes and paint over them, paint the garage and Kristy’s old room. It was a daunting task to say the least. We had a smidgen of paint left over that matched our walls perfectly so we used that to get the match. They put a sample of our original paint on a stir stick and then applied their match right next to our sample. The color matched perfectly on the stick and away we went touching up. When that color dried, it turned out to be darker on our walls. The sad news is that I have no more sample left as I poured the new dark color into my old sample mixture and it’s all gone!

I went online to find out how to get a perfect match. I found I needed to create little samples of the dark color and add white to it. I used small styrofoam cups and plastic teaspoons to create my samples. I added 1 teaspoon of the darker paint to 1 teaspoon of white, added to another cup 2 teaspoons of dark to 1 teaspoon of white, until I had 5 different combinations of colors. I took a marker and wrote on the cups so that I knew the equation of each. Then I took a brush and put these swatches of paint on the wall. I used the blue painters tape on the wall and marked the equatoin on the tape next to each sample.

For the tricky part… The one that seems to match just right when you look head on looks lighter when you look at it from the right angle and dark from the left angle. Sounds crazy, I know! The old paint on our walls is flat, so we are using flat paint, so that can’t be it, how can this be so hard?

Then I called the company that built our home to see if they still use the same paint color. Come to find out they still use the same color they used when they built our home 5 years ago! They gave me the name of the store to purchase the color as well as the color and brand of paint they use. I thought I was really on to something so Bobby stopped by the store last evening on his way home from work. The store gave him a little test sample so that we could give it a try and to no avail. The color is still too dark. What to do, what to do?

Bobby has the perfect solution. He’s going to hire the work to be done and have the same professional we’ve used in the past to paint our garage and Kristy’s old room. This guy has matched this color in the past and we’re going to leave it to the pro to get this job done!

In other news, our house will officially go on the market this Friday the 13th! My trusty little magic wand will have us looking spotless for pictures and ready to show.