We can finally paint the kitchen

I've wanted to paint the kitchen for so long, but I brought in dozens, perhaps over a hundred paint swatches and never found anything that worked. Despite the fact that the colors that seemed to always look best were the greens, I didn't WANT more green, dammit, I wanted a really warm color, with orange being my tone of choice.

Well tonight we perused yet another bank of pain samples and came home with another stack. I did my normal ritual - take the colors and attach them to hang just behind/under the fronts of the wall cabinets. See, it's the natural oak cabinets with their yellow/orange tones that kept most warm colors from working in there.

I put up the colors and then start just looking at them, not just looking at the aesthetics but, at the risk of sounding really weird, I try to get a sense of how they make me feel, what emotions they provoke in me (if there's anything beyond ewww no). Until tonight, none of the warm colors have worked. But tonight I had up a half-dozen, and one just stood out. I called V. downstairs to look at them without saying which was calling to me. It took maybe two minutes, probably less, to decide definitively on the one I'd chosen. That's how we always end up picking color - we don't consider anything that doesn't just really FEEL right to both of us.

It's a mid-range tone, something like a brown-tinged orange, a lighter relative to terra cotta. But it works. V. even held it up to all of the key things in the kitchen - our painting of sunflowers, the stained glass of tulips, my 70's orange decoupaged breadbox, and they all went well. We even find a strange compatibility between it and the two mint-green tiles that I rescued that had been part of my beloved Granny's original kitchen - somehow, those two long edge tiles are going to be incorporated into a tile backsplash behind the stove.

Now I just need M.A. or Laura or ege's husband - you know, someone who actually can do a decent job painting - to come help me paint it. Because I really want it done nicely.

Maybe I'll ask for that as my Holiday present - hire a professional painter to paint the kitchen and the office, which might be a light teal though I'd love to find a soft warm grayish lavender/violet.