No that’s not the beginning of a bad joke, that’s how our adventures in finding the perfect shade of gray for the nursery could be described. If you remember, we started off with Olympic’s Gray Beard…

Which was way too light and way too blue for our taste. We rummaged through some of the 8 million swatches we picked up once again and chose another gray.

We pulled out Gray Goose and decided to (wisely) get a tester this time. But we put the color on the walls and it wasn’t what we expected…

It was too brown and had some funky purpley/pink undertones in the room. I scratched my head for a bit trying to think of what color we actually wanted. Gray was too gray, taupe was too brown… was I losing my mind? But then I started to feel like I’ve been down this road before in the search for a perfect neutral. I mean, most of our house is painted in varying shades of gray…

I had all of these shades of gray to look at right on our own walls. I thought our entryway color, the middle color in the top row, might give off the too brown/pinkish tinge in the nursery though it looks normal in the entryway. Then I thought that the first gray in the second row might be perfect. It’s Olympic’s Gray Ghost and we used it for the lighter stripe in our office…

By some sort of miracle, I stumbled upon the swatch while I was getting dressed in our closet on Tuesday morning. I apparently stash swatches everywhere and it was one of the neutrals we considered for our bedroom (which has yet to be painted). I immediately brought it into the nursery and held it up to the wall to see how it worked. I also held it up against the bedding, curtain fabric and my dark gray leggings which represented the glider we’re planning to buy. Everything looked promising, but since we’ve been there, done that (twice!), we wanted to try some paint on the walls. I figured we had to have some left over from the last time we painted but even better, we still had the tester we used a year ago (already!)

Mike put some of it on the wall and sent me pictures while I was at work (since I never make it home before dark)…

There is is on the bottom of the corner, with the Gray Goose above it and the Gray Beard in the background. It’s definitely much better than the other two!

You can see here that it doesn’t have that purpley/pink thing going on that the Gray Goose did.

Nor is it blue, which you can see from this picture where the Gray Ghost is on top of the Gray Beard. The testers only come in satin, hence the sheen in this picture.

After a journey through what felt like any color that Olympic started with the word “gray”, I think we have a winner! We don’t have enough paint leftover from the office to cover the entire nursery, so we have to pick up another can this weekend. Hopefully then the painting will be completed because this little set back has cost us a week of time!

Maybe rather than a bad joke, Beard, Goose and Ghost can make some childhood game. Like duck, duck, goose or rock paper scissors? I want to be a paint color namer when I grow up…

Tags: gray beard, Gray Ghost, gray goose, Olympic