Picking a Good Gray

If you look around the internet you’ll find loads of blog posts about picking the perfect gray.  I know, I’ve been scouring the internet for the “perfect gray” for the past couple of months!  I’m finally nearing the stage of painting the big room that houses our kitchen and dining area…plus the hallway that goes into our laundry/garage entry door.  I knew I wanted something different than the pastel purple that it was painted when we bought the house:

This color may have gone great with the grape vine curtains, but a huge area painted this color is just overwhelming!!  The color does nothing for the cabinets and floor either. 
The past couple of weeks now I’ve been looking at paint samples and a within the last week I’ve been painting samples all over the walls in here.  After painting a foam board in Benjamin Moore’s Moonshine, I quickly learned that the lighting in here tends to make that particular gray look very blueish.  And while I like the color, it just made the floor and cabinets look even more orange/red than they are. 
I didn’t want white as I’d like some white shelves and my white hutch to “pop” in here, and I didn’t want anything too dark as this side of the house doesn’t get a huge amount of sunlight. 
So, I went and got some paint chips and then samples in these Benjamin Moore colors:  Balboa Mist, Collingwood, and Silver Satin. 
Here they are on the wall:

They all look veeerrrry similar in this picture, but in real life Balboa Mist and Collingwood are pretty similar and Silver Satin is a lot lighter/whiter than the others. 
Here they are on another wall (the lighting here is terrible…but then again these colors will have to look good in any lighting situation so I suppose this is a good test!):

Again, in real life Silver Satin is much lighter than the others, but you get the idea.  Oh, and you can probably see what I’m talking about when it comes to Moonshine…a pretty color but in here much too blue-ish.   
I was going to show one more wall but they just looked all the same in that picture…I guess that’s what happens when the colors you choose are so similar! 
And the winner is…
Collingwood!!  It is a nice soft gray-meets-white-meets-a tiny bit of beige (notice I’m not calling it greige here!!!  for some reason that word gives me the heeby-jeebies…I’m weird I know :).  I felt the white of the frame just blended right into Silver Satin and Balboa Mist wasn’t much of a contrast either. 
I guess the moral of the story is…always always buy tester sizes for your paint, especially gray colors!!  It can read so very differently in each particular lighting situation.  I thought that Balboa Mist would be the winner…and I really love the pictures I’ve seen of it…but in this room I really felt Collingwood was more ‘right’. 
Now off to the paint store…
:)