Color Crisis

It feels like things have slowed down a bit lately.  But, they are picking up again and we should be in the semi-final stretch.  Tiling the bathrooms has started.  Here is the hall bath - basic subway tile and travertine floors (still needs to be grouted and the shelves put up). It's a bit hard to take a picture since there is no electricity/lights in the house, but you get the idea

The main thing we've been dealing with lately is a color crisis.  We had about 8 color swatches put on the house and the whole family agreed on one (Tom's parents and Hank were even with us).  Well, we paint the whole house that color and....it's way too light.  It's not a bad color, but much lighter than we wanted, especially since we want the tan accents around the windows and on the brackets to stand out.  Right now the colors would be too close.  It actually looks a bit darker in this picture than it does in person since it was cloudy:

So, we did the logical thing and chose one shade darker and tried that out...too dark!  Argh!  You can see the darker shade patch here, on the left side of the window:

So around town I drive collecting paint samples from various stores.  I selected 4 new colors that are somewhere in between these two and I guess we'll see how that goes.  We almost just settled on the original color, but decided that the outside color is kinda  a big deal.  We don't want to drive up to our sparkling new house and regret the color every day.  ...And we haven't even started on all the inside colors yet!

Besides that mess, the trim has been put up around doors.  You can see it on all the doors at the top of the stairs here (not yet painted) - along with Lilah's little dungeon door where we'll put her when she's bad (actually it was a utility closet for the water heater, although that got moved elsewhere) :)

Also, I don't think I mentioned, but the original slate tile put on the back porch had to be removed.  The guy laid down 3/4 of the tile and then realized he didn't have enough in that color, and a new palate would be a different color and look weird.  So they had to drill it all up and start over.  We are almost done with the new tile, and I think it looks great (still needs to be cleaned up, so it wont look swirly when it's done).  Just ignore the contractors butt in the right side of the picture...not the most flattering shot for sure.

I'm REALLY hoping we get a move on from here.  Kitchen needs to be built from scratch so that's a big project.  I shouldn't complain because we're still ahead of schedule...but....let's get a move on!