chimney smoke paint and a gallery wall

Over the weekend our front room got a little...sexier. Dang. Dark walls are just so fine.

This is the third time we've painted this room (but we're still happily married! hey!) since we bought the house a little over a year ago and I am so thrilled to say that the third time was a charm. 

When we moved in the room was light gray and it just looked washed out. Like blah to infinity. So we tried a soft, clean white and again it just looked blah. We tried some neutral samples like oatmeal tones, but again we just didn't love it enough to repaint the whole dang room again. 

The room just doesn't get a lot of natural light, so any lighter color just didn't get any help. 

So then we started looking into the dark, charcoal, almost black options. Jake thought I was crazy, heck I thought I was crazy for thinking the darkest color on the spectrum would work for this room, but we (meaning I got in the car and didn't tell Jake where exactly I was going) decided to give it a go.  Lowes was having a sale on their sample sizes a few months ago, buy one sample get one free, so we (I) bought 10 samples of essentially the same color. Because you can never be too sure.

Theses are the ones we chose. 

I was positive we would go with Inkwell, Black of Night or the Off Black, but all of them looked really greenish-gray on our walls. Domino and Raccoon Fur where too purple and Caviar was just too black.

Although we wanted to go dark, we still wanted it to be warm and Chimney Smoke was our absolute favorite. It has just a touch of navy in it so that it looks rich and like it has a lot of depth. The pictures above make it look a lot bluer than it is in real life. The picture at the bottom of the post is the most accurate depiction of the color.  When you look at the room as a whole, the blueish undertones don't stand out. 

And now let's talk about the gallery wall. Pretty much I consider it the 8th wonder of the world because it was not as easy as I thought to get arranged and up all the wall. That is mostly because our children were trying to crawl, sit and play dinosaurs (naked) on the frames. We tried to sedate them with french fries while we were to laying out and hanging the frames, but turns out sedation by french fries doesn't work. Sorry if you were planning on trying it. Hate to break the bad news.

Anyway, thanks to Christmas and my birthday we had a nice stock pile of gift cards to Target, and a lot of the frames we used were on clearance a few weeks ago so we ended up spending about $40 out of pocket. Not too bad! Hanging all the pictures equaled more pictures than we have ever hung in are whole marriage because we are literally that classy and own nothing. Minimalists by meager bank accounts. 

And of course there is turkey lurkey doing what he does best. Lurking. 

I think he likes the color too. Or just the smell of the paint. I'm a horrible mother for letting him be in here. 

So what do you think of the color?? And the 8th wonder of the world??