Letting the experts take over my color dilemma

My new colors. 

So... my color choices for the basement were a bomb. No one really liked them, and they weren't as pretty in the basement as I thought they'd be. Such is the life of a person who has no natural light in their home. Which makes decorating twice as hard because I also have no natural talent for such things.

This time, when I went to choose new colors, I visited the color experts. I went to a store we have here called Guiry's. They are color and decorating experts, so I went and talked to them about my options. What can you do in a dark basement that has dark blue carpet?

I have to say, I was really impressed with them from the beginning. I was immediately directed to two helpful women who asked me a lot of great questions and started pulling out colors they thought would work. They also told me why my colors didn't... apparently the colors I chose had gray undertones, which make dark rooms look dingy. Who knew? It was pretty funny, because they'd show me two sets of colors and ask which I liked better. Each time, my answer (to their horror) was that I didn't notice a difference. Yep, I'm that hopeless.

So they helped pick better colors. The yellows have a more green undertone as opposed to gray (in fact, depending on the light and who is looking, they look green), so I'll have three light walls, and then one dark wall. The pretty blue/green will be for the shelving unit my FIL is making me. I'd have liked to have done more with that color, but as you can see from my blue carpet, that'd be way too much blue. I have to say that their choices were braver than what I would have gone, but I'm going to try them anyway. It's only paint, right?  I can repaint if we really don't like it...

But I think we will.

The lesson I learned in this (I think) is that sometimes, even though we want to be independent and do it all on our own, sometimes we need to admit we're in way over our heads and ask the experts for help. I'm pretty independent, so I tend to do more on my own than I should. But in the future, I think I'm just going to save myself a lot of headache and ask someone who knows about color instead of muddling through on my own.

When do you call in the experts?