The last time we talked about painting the mudroom, we were deciding between these 2 colors:

Then I teased on a recent mudroom post that we might end up with a totally different color. Well, the mudroom got painted Thursday, and we ended up with a color nobody expected! Let me explain.

I had an epiphany a few weeks back that we should just paint the whole room white. We were going to have PPG Breakthrough paint (our painters preferred paint and after a lot of research what we thought was the best product) matched to Sherwin Williams Alabaster (2016 color of the year). Please note that I spent hours deciding on the right white. In another post, I’ll give you some helpful resources I used.

The painters were at our house all day Thursday and left at about 8-8:30 pm. As we went to check it out, we both agreed that it looked a little yellow. We didn’t panic. We figured that it was the lighting and all of the brown paper in the room that was covering the surfaces that weren’t getting painted. However, we decided to go ahead and check the swatch in the room. The swatch looked NOTHING like the paint. The paint wasn’t just a little yellow, it was really yellow. It was clear that the paint match did not go well (or so we thought). There were tears, panic, late night emails, etc. The painters were suppose to come back in the morning to finish up a few things. Friday morning, it didn’t appear that our painter had gotten our panic email, so we made some phone calls and left for work. We instructed my mom (who watches our kids and is always dealing with our problems) to talk to the painters when they arrived. She showed them our swatch and they agreed that the room was NOT painted in that color. They said they would work toward a solution, and my mom headed off to MOPS to impart her wisdom to young mothers of preschoolers at church. I wonder if her lesson was how to not raise kids that still require so much of their mother at 34 years old 🙂

At work, I tried to teach my wonderful first period students without thinking too much about what was going on at home. Luckily, second period I was giving a test, so while my students worked, I googled random paint words together to see if I could solve our problems….ha! Well, guess what…I figured out the problem! PORTER ALSO HAS A PAINT COLOR CALLED ALABASTER….and that is DEFINITELY what was on our walls! (Click on the link. I can’t get the swatch off of their site, and it doesn’t appear people on pinterest use this color. I don’t blame them. It looks a little tan on my computer, but looked yellowish/goldish at school and in real life). There was definitely a communication breakdown somewhere, but I had it in writing and also told someone the night before they were coming to paint that we wanted the paint matched to SHERWIN WILLIAMS Alabaster. I emailed the painter, Parker, and my mom to tell them what the problem was.

My mom texted me when she got back to our house and they were already almost finished repainting the room in the correct color! Such a relief! I had imagined all of the ways they would try to blame this on me or get out of fixing it, but they fixed it with no problems or cost to us. I was impressed! I think we hired the right people. Everyone makes mistakes, but not everyone makes it right. Now it looks like this:

I could not be happier with the way it turned out! It really is the perfect white. I would describe it as milky. Its not too stark, but also not off white. I’m trying to figure out what room I can do in this color next. We have one more surprise in here. We are going to tackle that tomorrow possibly. Then we will be ready to start hanging hooks, lights, etc. This really is a dream room. Add this room to the home-a-rama tour 😉

What do you guys think? Anybody else have a paint horror story? (Though, I can’t really count this as a horror story since there was a happy ending).

Jalene