We had a wee accident the other day . . .
A rather stuck cork in a bottle of rioja suddenly decided to disengage itself with a fountain of red wine ending up on the wall behind our sofa (and also all over the sofa, and me, but that’s beside the point as the sofa cover has been washed and me too …)
The end result is that we have rioja stains on the wall over our sofa.
The walls in our livingroom are vanilla coloured – the same colour as proper vanilla icecream. It’s rather a large room with the sofa and tv-viewing area on one end, the dining table is in the middle, against a side wall between the two balconies, and my computer desk is next to the built-in book shelves at the other end of the room.
Our dilemma is about either trying to find the exact same vanilla colour to paint over the rioja stains on that one wall or whether we should paint it a contrasting colour, like a nice deep terracotta.
I think the room is big enough to have one contrasting coloured wall, but the deep orangy terracotta thing I’m thinking of might be too strong.
The sofa cover is off-white and we have orangy cushions on it. Hardwood light oak coloured floors (also slightly orangy) . The coffee table and dining room table are also this same light oak colour. The trim, doors, ceiling and bookshelves are white.
Accent colours in the room are cobalt blue, orange and a small bit of pale yellow.
Help?
casa azahar 
Personally, I would go with white, but that’s just because I dislike the way differing colored walls look. Contrasting trim, on the other hand, is pretty darn cool…
Having seen photos with the sofa and cushions in them, IF you were to go with color, I would think a terra cotta color (if you’re thinking it’s too strong, it could be toned down, I’m sure) would be nice. Blue is a really great comeplement to orange- my bathroom is orange and blue, and I love the way it looks. A cobalt color might look nice, or a medium blue… nothing too pale, if you know what I mean?
If you do go with white again,make sure you use a good primer, or the stains will show through. Voice of experience- I had the same problem with a bottle of nail polish several years ago.
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The walls aren’t white, they are a vanilla ice cream colour, a light pale yellow.
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I’ve never seen vanilla ice cream that wasn’t white, so I’m afraid I misunderstood. Here in the states, only the cheap, artificially flavored vanilla ice cream is yellow in color- the premium stuff is pure white… re-reading your original post, I can see that in Spain, the opposite is true.
Any way, I’m sure that color would need a good primer coat beforehand, too.
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Rather than terracotta, I’d suggest a sort of burnt gold. I have no idea what it’s really called, but that’s what it looks like to me. It’s a dark yellow, tending towards a brown orange, without the gaudy yellowyness. (I wonder if that makes any sense.)
What colour are rioja stains, exactly? I’m imagining they’re a bit like a bruise.
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Do you mean ochre? That might actually work quite well as it would tone in with the pale yellow of the other walls and not ‘clash’ with some of the orangy things we have in the room.
Kind of like the yellow in the fish ? They’re kind of hard to make out but they are kind of an orangy-yellow with darker orange ‘scales’ painted over top. Hmmm…the wall in that photo looks a bit pinkish – it isn’t really.
Rioja stains on a wall are similar to when you get them on light coloured clothes. Yeah, they turn sort of blueish, like a bruise.
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Yes, fish yellow. I wouldn’t have thought of that as ochre; to me, ochre is the colour of the cliff I fell off once. That was definitely ochre, and it was a lot closer to a brownish red.
Trying to describe colours is fun, isn’t it?
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Well, there is both ochre and vanilla ice cream on this chart, neither of which is what I’d call them. Their ‘sun porch’ is close to the yellowy-orange colour on the fish.
On this chart their ‘yolk’ is what I’d call ochre and ‘crème fraiche’ is the colour of our walls.
Then again, these colours will probably look quite different on different computer screens.
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The Vanilla Frost here http://www.materials-world.com/paint-colors/valspar_lows_laura_ashley/valspar_lowes_tradition/valspar_lowes_tradition_47.htm is more like ice cream. I checked the pantone colours to see how good my screen is.
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On my screen ‘seashell’ looks most like my walls, alji. Too bad we haven’t got Nog’s laptop here to compare but I remember that colours always came out looking quite different on his screen than on mine.
Anyhoodle, we’ve just got back from buying some paint called ‘ocre natural’ and it actually looks very close to the colour of the Sherwin Williams tab on those colour chart pages.
I think it should look nice as a contrast colour. We didn’t have a lot of choice as the only places in the centre that sell paint just have the pre-mixed stuff – and we were not prepared to schlep out to the suburbs in case we found a slightly different tone of ochre we liked better (and anyhow, Nog can’t see the subtle differences as he’s colour blind).
But it was definitely a better choice than going with the terracotta – thanks Ivan! 🙂
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How about moving the sofa out, placing some dust sheets or newspaper down and then having a Rioja fight in front of the wall, even to the extent of silhouettinbg each other with the lovely stuff?
Once it is dry use one of those smell remover sprays and voila – instant Jackson Pollock, but in sweet, sweet wine.
For an extra little touch, both sign the wall.
Matholwch .
A man who lives way out in right field.
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Gee, why didn’t we think of that? 😉
Main problem there is that the rioja stains are this weird blueish colour and not particularly decorative … though a rioja fight does sound rather fun! 🙂
Really, it had been a stupid thing, trying to open this bottle of wine while we were watching a film … and then it just gushed out all over the place. Splat! And dang!
Well, never mind. We will soon have a nice ‘natural ochre’ colour there (plan to paint tomorrow) and if we have enough paint left over we might actually also do the wall behind our bed in the same colour.
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That color you picked out sounds really nice- I think it will look good behind the bed as well. Do we get to see how it looks when the paint is dry?
Ivan has a good eye for interior design. If I ever move to a place where I can paint the walls, I know where to come for help choosing paints.
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In ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’, Julie Andrews tries to get a wine stain out by using soy sauce…
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Well that don’t make no sense! 😉
Meanwhile, the best way to get red wine stains out of clothing is to soak them in cold water with a whole whack of bicarbonate of soda added to it. The stain immediately turns very BLUE and the next morning is almost gone, but the garment still needs to be properly washed afterwards with lots of soap and hottish water.
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Oh, the trick is that the garment should not be allowed to dry, so keep the stained area wet until you can do the bicarbonate of soda thang.
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Hi Math
A rioja fight sounds like fun, but we’re not sure we want a Jackson Pollock wall. Perhaps a water fight? Wouldn’t add anything to the decor, but who cares?
I think the natural ochre will look rather good, and although my skills as a handyman are limited I quite enjoy a spot of painting.
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Where is it in Spain that’s famous for its tomato fight?
My life was considerably enhanced by the friend who taught me to place a folded teatowel over a fresh spillage …and then jump up and down on it. Work’s a treat!
(Not so handy for walls, but.)
(The same guy later stitched me up during a prestigious job interview…but that’s another story).
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I can’t load that colour chart, so there’s another reason for getting broadband one day…
The rioja fight idea does sound like fun, but it might stain the cats.
Pc, the expert in colour selection was my grandmother. She was a seamstress, and what she didn’t know about colour and line wasn’t worth knowing.
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I just wrote a long post and it vanished. *sigh* Az, if it reappears, feel free to erase it.
Anyway, what I said was that a rioja fight does sound like fun, but it might stain the cats. Also, I can’t load that colour chart so I have another reason to get broadband one day.
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“(The same guy later stitched me up during a prestigious job interview…but that’s another story)” (raisedeyebrowssmiley) Do tell!
I think that color looks fab, az! Good suggestion, Ivan!
It’s kinda hard for me to tell what color the wall of your bedroom is now, as it all looks rather yellow in the photo to begin with…and just what *is* it that Azar seems so fascinated with out of range there?
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Well . . . that were HELL!!! All done now though. And the colour is fabulous (thanks again for the suggestion, Ivan!). 🙂
The main thing that made it hellish was that, being a darker contrasting colour, extra care had to be taken on the edges, especially where the walls meet in the corners. And this was made extra difficult by the fact that our walls are lightly stuccoed and the corners are a bit rounded, so it was hard to keep the brush going in a straight line as there was no straight corner line to follow and the wall surface is all nubbly. But it looks okay as long as you squint a little … 😉
Will take a photo of it once we get the place tidied up again. It really ‘warms up’ the room though, so the rioja explosion turned out to be a happy accident – we wouldn’t have considered painting the wall otherwise.
Though I think we’ll make a new house rule that from now on all wine must be opened in the kitchen (where there are floor to ceiling washable white tiles).
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“I wouldn’t have thought of that as ochre; to me, ochre is the colour of the cliff I fell off once. That was definitely ochre, and it was a lot closer to a brownish red.”
I was thinking about that, Ivan, and the colour you described as ochre is, to me, called ‘burnt umber’. And I had no idea where I got that name from until I remembered the Laurentian pencil crayons we used to use at school.
Mind you, you had to buy either the 24 or 48 pack (can’t remember which) to get such colours as ochre and burnt umber. I remember I once got the deluxe pack for Christmas – over 100 different colours – and I was in heaven.
In any case, this colour is also called ochre (or ocre) here in Spain. It’s a very traditional and much used colour here, though usually used for painting the outside of houses.
I think a whole room painted this colour would be a bit much, but it totally works as an accent colour.
As for the naming of colours, when Nog and I were going through some of those paint charts we wondered about whose job it was to invent the names – some of them were quite funny. 🙂
And curiously, the colour used on the Laurentian website is the exact colour of wall.
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What is an umber, and why would one burn it? One of the great unanswered questions, surely.
One of my exes had a mid-Victorian house with very high ceilings. He painted the dining room Venetian red. It was very striking and very stylish, with Pre-Raphaelite prints and dark timber furniture and lots of candlesticks – but dining in there felt like sitting in someone’s liver.
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“What is an umber, and why would one burn it?”
Fucked if I know – maybe we should write to the Laurentian guys and ask them.
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“but dining in there felt like sitting in someone’s liver”
If our whole room was this colour it would probably feel like sitting iside a pumpkin.
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Sounds a little odd, but better than a liver…
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So here it is … the new wall! (photos 70. 71 & 72)
We love it! 🙂
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Hey, any pictures of the finished product? Sorry if I missed it I’m joining late.
And, you have 2 balconies?!?!? That sounds pretty awesome.
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Looks up at comment 27 with the link to photos of the new wall … 🙄
No, we don’t have two balconies – we have six.
Two in the livingroom, one in the bathroom, two in our bedroom and another in our ‘studio’ that we call Lua’s room. The kitchen has a big window that opens into a patio light well. Lots of light in this place. 🙂
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Wow, I’m hoping that my failure to refresh prior to posting caused me to miss that…desperately hoping.
6 balconies, OK, now that’s just not fair.
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Nice. It appears to have the feline stamp of approval too. No self-respecting cat would sit near an aesthetically unpleasing wall. And yes, I think terracotta would have been a bit too strident.
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Atchly, Sunny will sleep just about anywhere – he is such a dog!
But you are the first to make a comment on the colour. And as we all know by now, photos of colours and computer screen variations can end up with us comparing apples and oranges (or pumpkins and livers).
As with the vanilla walls, the new ochre one changes colour all day long, but the general colour change is one Nog and I both like a lot.
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That color is really snappy, az. It really does something with the couch, makes it pop. Cat does too, of course… 😉
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I agree it’s a rather snappy colour, SC. 🙂
Meanwhile, my student Fran showed up for his class this morning and didn’t even notice it even after I pointed it out to him! His one question was – ‘oh, why did you only paint one wall?’
I woulda given him a smack on the head but that’s not what I’m paid for. He did try to make up for it later by going on about how ‘alegre’ the colour is … too little too late. 😉
Meanwhile, he is a sous-chef at a very posh restaurant here and often gives me tips on how to cook fish, so he is creative in other ways.
But place yer bets now that every female student who walks in here this week will immediately go – ‘oh-my-gawd, you’ve painted, what a nice change!’
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Very nice az! On my screen it’s a nice sandy orangy yellow.
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Yeah, it totally warms up the room, alji.
I wouldn’t want the whole room painted with it, but it’s a rather large and long room, so having that one ‘accent wall’ on one end makes the room look much more cosy than before. 🙂
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Wow! What I missed going out of town for a few days. The new wall is stunning. I like it a lot. I may have to rethink my kitchen plans after seeing how gorgeous that color is.
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Thanks, hmh. Weirdly, I tend to like the colour most in the morning and at mid-day with lots of light in the room. At night or very early morning when it’s still dark, with indirect lighting, it actually looks a bit sad or drab and more yellowy than orange.
I guess it’s why I’ve always preferred a soft monochrome colour theme throughout the apartment. The livingroom and bedroom are painted a light ‘vanilla’ and the hallways and studio room are white.
The kitchen and bathroom have floor-to-ceiling white tiles, which are nice, but the previous tenants put PINK swirly tile trim in the bathroom – and I totally hate PINK. Have tried to alleviate this pink (well, okay, it’s more a dusty rose) situation by putting lots of green plants in there and also deep blue ‘accessories’, such as blue flower pots, whatever.
It’s strange how colours can affect people.
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Well I went and picked out my new countertops, a nice almond color with some gold and brown flecking in them. I will be able to pick a real nice pale gold-white for the wall colors which will brighten the kitchen up considerably. I am not looking forward to the upheaval surrounding the replacement of countertops in the kitchen. I am praying for a quick turn over. Even so, I will have to unload the entire cabinet contents. Oy.
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The second-floor apartment in our building has pink and white floor tiles. I am so glad that ours are blue and white.
I can imagine how nice that wall looks when the room is full of bright sunshine, az.
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My walls are Ivory Linen, they have the vanilla color you are talking about…goes with everything, however, I recently painted the livingroom a lighter version of French Toast….looks fab…..
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