Color Matching Isn't

So we decided to host a student from Germany for the rest of the school year.  That meant we needed to create a bedroom.  Our office was originally one so it seemed simple to do. Wrong. Would someone please remind me next time that NOTHING is that simple?

We were excited because it was prompting us to tear out the bar cabinets downstairs to turn that area into an office.  The prior owners put those cabinets in.  Nice, but we never used them. Of course, behind and atop the cabinets are a variety of paint colors. And some strips of wallpaper. Ick.  Okay, the walls and the wallpaper I can handle.  But the ceiling?  We tried standard white ceiling paint. It looked white to us! But it made the original paint (in the rest of the HUGE family room) look gray.

So we took a quarter sized scraping and went to match it at Home Depot. It went on fine -- the color matched perfectly. Until it dried. Now it looks gray and the rest of the room looks white.

Sigh.

I decided to run a piece of painters tape along the ceiling in a straight line and paint the new color right up to the line. At least it will look like someone planned the pattern.

Here's what we are tearing out:

It turns out that our cable for our modem runs through the cabinets. It would be easy to fish out except (or course, there's always an except) that the connector for the cable is larger than the holes. One of our friends is an expert in the field so he's going to give us some new cable with a new kind of connector but my husband said, "no problem, end of the week is fine."  Did I mention the student will be joining our family on SATURDAY?

Sigh...so this is what my family room looks like right now:

That's primer on the wall.  Over green paint.  The kind of green paint they used to use in military hospitals.  I believe the color name is "Oh so unattractive."  If you look closely, you can see the difference in ceiling paint. Sigh.