Making the comfortable decision keeps you from reaching your potential. Comfortable is doing the same exercises over and over again and not getting any thinner. It’s the person who won’t speak in class unless she’s called upon. It’s the easy road, because it only takes you to destinations you’ve already been. monica o’brien
In the courses I was in years ago, the talk that really stuck with me was when the leader said “People have this weird relationship to failure. We live like there is seriously something wrong [with us] when we fail, when really that’s when we—many times—learn the most. If you do something right, most of the time, you have no idea what you just did or how you could do it again. We pat ourselves on the back, have a glass of champagne and move on. It’s when we fail that we can then look to see what was missing and put it in for next time.”
In the past, when the client would call and say ‘The colour looks wrong!’ I would totally panic. Now, I have learned a few things (before I race over to look at it) and I ask a few questions first:
1. Did you test the colour?
2. Are you in the middle of painting right now (which is when a new colour, being painted over the old one, can look really ugly in the middle of the job)? Especially if a ‘dirty’ colour is being painted over a ‘clean one’.
3. Is your house empty? Are you looking at the new colour within the context of all your new furniture and drapery that are about to be installed? Sometimes you need to show up with the fabrics and go through them again, especially when people have had white walls and now they are going with colour everywhere. It can be a shock.
What if it’s still wrong? Like just a few weeks ago, I had picked a bunch of colours for a client, they all turned out beautiful. We installed window coverings, everything was going well. Then I popped over to pick a colour for another room in the house where a duvet had been purchased in a purple colour. I picked the purple and later she called and asked if I could come over and look at it. I arrived, and sure enough, it looked like we had tried to match it and failed.
I didn’t get a photo but this one from flickr is close
Most paint decks don’t have enough purples in them [because it’s hardly used as a main wall colour, throughout the house] also there are more violets than any other colour in the world, because a violet starts at the blue side of the colour wheel, moves through purple and ends over at the reds.
So what happened? I went through all the other colours in the deck (feeling embarrased that I somehow had missed the right purple) and determined that it would have to be a custom colour to perfectly match the duvet (whew). Either that, or pick one that was quite a bit darker to create enough contrast that it wouldn’t have been an issue if the purple didn’t have just enough blue or red in it. (okay a third option would have been to try a different fan deck from another paint company but I generally don’t have this problem so I don’t travel with more than one architectural kit)
Bottom line: I should have had the painter test the colour on a bigger sample (I didn’t have one of my bigger samples in the colour I originally selected). In the end, my client decided to simply buy a new duvet as it would have cost more to have the room re-painted.
This is why I love colour so much, it’s never boring or predictable. Sometimes it even makes me feel uncomfortable [when I think I should already know] but then I learn something new and that makes me happy.
Related posts:
Should you pay for a room to be re-painted if You Chose the Colour?
5 Designer Secrets that will make or break your paint Colours
3 Ways to Beat the High Cost of buying the Wrong Paint Colour
