CITRINE DREAM

I’ve always loved green, just ask my mom. In high school, we re-did my bedroom to remove the nursery style wallpaper and mint green carpet that had been there since we moved in and I promptly requested painting my room a bright green. We struck a compromise when I agreed to paint one of the walls a dark purple (my other favorite color at the time). Her biggest concern was that it would make the whole room glow green…which it kind of did, but not in a bad way…more of an “I’m a really awesome shade of green” way. So when it came time to choose a paint color for the front door of our (not so little) House on a Hill, I was immediately sold on green.

The color scheme I’m working with inside the house has a slight retro/mid-century vibe to it – teals, greens, some pinks and oranges in subtle places – so I wanted to make sure to carry that color scheme outside as well. With a back-up plan of painting the door to match the kitchen cabinets, I set off on the hunt for the perfect shade of retro-inspired chartreuse.

I must have looked at 20 paint colors by different manufacturers and nothing seemed to be quite right on paper so I started buying paint samples. I found that the tricky part to painting an exterior door chartreuse was finding a paint color that wasn’t going to look like it was just a dirty door covered in pollen (I have horrible seasonal allergies so that just seemed like an awful thing to come home to).

During this process, the husband made me promise to not put paint swatches on the front door. He thought it would look awful from the street and in general he just hates paint swatches (it’s probably my own fault for going through 4 samples of teal to find the right shade in our first apartment). Sure enough, I could not live up to that promise…it was just too hard to decide based on the side-porch door! The lighting was totally NOT the same there and I couldn’t step back and see how it looked with the siding and the windows. It just simply didn’t work. So much to his dismay, we lived with a few samples on the door (and ceiling) for a couple of weeks until I was finally ready to commit. It was SO NOT as bad as he thought it was, but hey, he can have his own opinion as long as I get the color I want 😉

(See, you can barely even tell that there’s swatches on the door and ceiling!)

The color we ended up going with was a bit more on the avocado side of green, but OMIGOSH I LOVE IT. It’s called Citrine Dream by Valspar. I was nervous about how it would look with the cool grey and the wood posts (which will be stained a bit darker with a slight grey wash), but I think it’s going to be great. We also picked out a color for the ceiling in the porch which will be a super light blue called Fuzzy Slippers (I may or may not make my final decisions on paint colors based on the name…it’s worked out pretty well so far!).