Live and Learn Lesson: Painting Shutters

We have learned a lot of lessons playing this DIY game. Today's lesson: don't trust the paint color matcher at Lowe's, you might be seriously disappointed.

But let's back up a step.

Out initial plan of painting the shutters also included painting the exterior door trim.

As you see I'm the above picture, the door trim and shutters are that funky brown color that totally made the house feel dated. The house was built in 87, but I swear that color made the house look older than it was. And nobody/no thing wants to look older that it is. So we decided to do a little painting.

This is one of those projects that you think should be super easy, in theory, and it ends up with you hanging out a window ready to jump.

J/K on the jumping part, but for real on hanging out the window. Removing the second story shutters without a decent ladder is no joke. Hubby to the rescue again!

Anyways, we started with our usual trip to Lowes to pick out paint colors for its project. We thought it would be super easy if we could spray paint the shutters for an nice even coat. I headed to the paint  chip selection where I remembered seeing chips that said they were available in spray paint. Except, they didn't actually match the spray paint can selection. We picked out a spray paint we liked from the selection of cans instead and headed to the paint counter to see if they could match the color. It was a record quick trip. We left with 4 cans of navy spray paint and a 1/2 quart if exterior satin paint in the "matching" navy color.

Valspar Oceanic Satin

First, we spray painted the shutters. Though Justin had to hang out the window to unscrew them from the house, it wasn't too difficult of a project.

We finished the lower level shutters first, and screwed them back on.

I worked on painting the trim around the front door while Justin worked on the shutters. It was when the shutters went back up that we realized we had a probem... The shutters and the trim are totally different shades of blue. Womp, womp. Lowe's paint color matching fail. Our lesson was learned the hard way that you should probably paint something first, and if possible, bring in that item in order to have Lowe's color match your item. Relying on a peice of spray painted paper just doesn't work.

Reattaching the shutters was by far the worst part of all of this. We even considered renting a tall enough to reach that second story in order to complete our "easy" project. Justin managed successfully, though, to wield the heavy power drill and hold the shutters in the exact matching position that shutters had been in previously in order to reattach them.

Now, we just have to decide whether or not we gamble with another $16 to see if Lowe's can better color match the trim around the door. I thought at first that the slight color difference would drive me nuts, but the longer we live with it, the less noticeable it has become. Has anybody else had any similar experiences? What color matching guidance can you provide?