My partner Chris and I moved into our house close to 6 years ago. When we bought the house, every (and I do mean every) wall was painted yellow, even the ceilings and closet interiors! He insisted upon painting the closets a nice bright white, and I insisted on painting the ceilings white as well. I thought I'd be able to live with yellow walls for a while. Well, you know how it goes: 1 thing calls for 10 more. We spent 4 weeks painting the whole house before we moved in. (Side note: after managing to put olive green footprints across the master bedroom floor and spilling a quart of Laura Ashley Taupe #5 on the white carpet in the living room, I was banned from painting!) I wanted a cool kind of steely blue on the walls in the kitchen and family room. It took us 4 trips to the paint store before I got it right. Blue is a hard color to pick!
About a year after we moved in, I noticed that on of the walls in the family room seemed to be a slight bit greener than every other wall. I was convinced that in our Pin The Tail On The Paint Swatch game that we had somehow gotten colors mixed and painted that wall the wrong color. Chris; however, was convinced that it was just the light coming in the south facing windows on the opposite wall. We have bantered about this for the last 5 years.
Our painter came back last week to repaint the front door and do some minor touchups around the house. I asked him what he thought of my green wall amidst the two blue rooms and he agreed with me! The wall was a different color, maybe like the next closest on a paint chart. He went to the garage and got the original steel blue paint and brought it in to make a few test spots in various places. After the spots had dried, neither one of us could find them, but we were still sure that the wall had to be repainted; of course, without Chris knowing! When the wall was repainted to my satisfaction, we left it to dry and revisited the situation a few hours later and guess what? It was STILL the wrong color! How? We had put test spots on every wall in the room to make sure we had started with the right color!
Chris came home later and he rolled his eyes at me and simply said, "I told you, it's just the way the light comes in the room." But this didn't make sense to me. You could clearly see at each corner that the colors didn't seem to match. I sat in the chair staring at the wall for a minute.
Then came the ton of bricks.
Yellow and blue make green.
In the middle of steel blue walls in the family room... on the floor... is a 10x14 rug. Buttercup yellow. And sure enough, when the light from the south facing windows on the opposite wall reflects off the light yellow rug... it kind of makes the steel blue wall go a little green, just ever so slightly.
So I've learned my lesson! Yes, yellow and blue make green. But somehow, deep inside me, I still wonder if that damn wall is a different color.
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