If there are any wood-purists reading this, get your pearls ready. The first thing EVERYONE has said upon seeing this house was some variant of “omg look at all that wood!” Um well… get ready for some disappointment.

I’m painting the trim.

Commence clutching of pearls.

I know this is a very polarizing topic and I’m not going to change anyone’s mind, but here’s my thought process:

I’m a very firm believer of that if it’s yours you can do whatever you want to it to make you love it. Enjoy your space, your furniture, your whatever to the fullest. The wood trim just isn’t doing it for me. I think it works better with a more classic style and I’m very eclectic. The last couple apartments I’ve lived in have been from around the same time period and have had white trim. I personally think this is gorgeous in turn of the century homes. The trim is also not in nearly as good a shape as it looks form the general pictures. There’s a decent amount of damage, some missing quarter round, and assorted areas that just need some patching.  The trim in the kitchen/mud room is also completely different from the rest of the house and the dining room will need all new base boards after we rip the bookcases out.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do in the family room since the paneling is actually in really good shape so I don’t really want to paint that, but I still want to maintain continuity.

I know there will be plenty of people out there who think I’m doing a horrible thing (heck, I’m pretty sure my own mother is one of them), and that’s ok. We really all have to go with our own guts for our design choices because your home design isn’t really for anyone else but you. If you try and make every decision based around “the future home buyer” you’ll just go crazy.

ANYWAY

Do you know how frackin hard it is to choose a white paint? Hard. I could have just used an off-the-shelf white white, but I though that would be a little too stark, especially in an old home. But once you get away from pure white you get grey tints, yellow tints, blue tints…. basically every color of the rainbow tinted whites. This means your “white” can end up reading a little funky as the light changes.

Here’s the thing though, there’s no single solution for the “perfect white trim color.” Colors depend a lot on the environment they’re in—what’s the light like? What are the surrounding colors like? Yeah… the only thing to do is pick up a crap-ton of swatches and tape them up everywhere. I did do a little bit of googling to find out other people’s go-to trim colors (otherwise I’d be bringing home every single white swatch in the store…which I came close to doing anyway).

So if you’re trying to decide on a white trim color, here’s are what seem to be the top 5 go-to colors I found:

Benjamin Moore: Simply White

Benjamin Moore: White Dove

Benjamin Moore: Decorators White

Benjamin Moore: Cloud White

Benjamin Moore: Chantilly Lace

(Apparently designers/decorators really like Benjamin Moore…The nice thing though is that pretty much any paint place can color match to anything nowadays)

For the past few weeks I have had about 15 swatches (Benjamin Moore, Behr, Ralph Lauren… I just kind of hoarded white samples when I would walk by a paint display) taped to a shelf from a BILLY bookcase that I’ve moved from room to room and stared at. Eventually I hope to give our existing BILLYs an custom built-in look in the living so I want the trim color compliment them.  It doesn’t have to match exactly for my plans, but it can’t leave them looking dingy, so an ultra white is right out.

After 3 weeks of staring at the swatches in nearly every room and in nearly every light condition I think I’ve made a decision.  And the winner is…. BM Simply White.  It’s just ever-so-slightly not quite pure white but unlike the other swatches it doesn’t get too creamy, too gray, or even (as happened with a couple samples) too brown.  I also used it to paint our bedroom dressers a while back so I know it does actually read white. It was a close race with that and BM Cotton Balls for a while. Cotton Balls looked the absolute best with the bookcases, but a tad dingy against the white appliances and future carrera marble/subway tile plans for the kitchen.  Ultimately I figured I could always paint the bookcases, but that would be harder for appliances and tile.