Happy Monday, friends! I hope ya’ll had a great weekend! It was raining here in Dallas most of the weekend…and still drizzling today. I know we need the rain, but I am ready for the sun. I am definitely happier when the sun is shining — anyone else have that problem?

Speaking of dilemmas, I wanted to share how our dining room paint makeover turned out. If you’ve been reading the blog for the past two summers, then you know that I purchased a dining room table and china cabinet from Craigslist to re-purpose. These are two of my favorite pieces of furniture in our house. After the table and china cabinet were complete, we painted our dining room ‘gray’, or so we thought. Even though we tried swatches of paint on the wall prior to painting, as soon as the painting was complete I always say a lavender hue in the walls. The hubs, who was so sweet to paint the room with me, suggested I live with it for a year and if I still wasn’t in love with the color a year later we’d re-paint.

I wish I would have fallen in love with the color over time,  but this did not happen. This February I began the search for a new ‘gray’. I have learned so much about grays in the process. Gray paint can have a blue, green, brown, pink-ish/purple-ish undertone and it will speak differently in the daylight of the room and against the furniture in a room. So much for this easy neutral color, right?!

After hosting a Super Bowl Party with about 10 different shades painted on our walls & countless gray paint recommendations, we finally settled on Sherwin Williams Light French Gray.

After painting, my mom so sweetly helped me style our floating shelves and we added too-cute, brown & natural checked curtains from Hobby Lobby, which soften the window in the room. The linen feel of the curtain panels still let in so much natural light, too. If you haven’t checked out Hobby Lobby for curtain panels, I highly recommend you do. I have purchased all of my curtain panels from Hobby Lobby and have been very impressed with their overall quality and styles.

I’d love to eventually add something on either side of the china cabinet or on the wall to the right of the china cabinet… on the hunt this summer for ideas!

I tried to take few different views of the room at different times of the day with both natural and artificial light, so you could get a true read of the color and let me tell you, this room is so hard to photograph, but I am oh-so-happy with our paint choice! I spent most Saturdays in April & May grading papers at the dining room table, because I wanted to spend more time in here.

So the moral of the story is… even if you LOVE design and home decor, you can make design mistakes and sometimes fixing them takes a new coat of paint. If at first you don’t succeed, paint, paint again! (And… be really sweet to those you love so they’ll help you!)