Interior designers will tell you the proper process for choosing paint involves finding an inspiration piece and pulling the paint color directly from that piece. It involves buying paint samples and applying them all to the wall to decide which works best in different light. They will not tell you the truth:

it’s really all about the thinking tube.

Remember we are redoing our office by adding a wall of built-in bookshelves that will look (something like) this:

From the beginning I knew I wanted to do something different on the back wall behind the shelves instead of just painting them white. I thought about wallpaper:

via Samantha Pynn inc
But decided I want something that felt a little calmer, so we settled on paint. I was torn between a deep blue-green and navy, so we got paint chips for every possibility within that range, took them home and propped them up on the shelves:

Then we checked out each chip at night and in daylight, with our snazzy undercabinet lights on and off, gradually eliminating one paint chip after another, until we got stuck.

We couldn’t decide between the last four, and that’s when

INSPIRATION STRUCK!

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce “The Thinking Tube” (patent pending). Some people might think it’s just a play tunnel for small children:

But the truth is that it has magical clarifying properties that allow you to make prompt decisions. In the middle of our paint color-choosing dilemma, Andy said excitedly, “WAIT a second. I need a moment in the thinking tube.”

Suddenly overcome with knowledge and decision-making abilities, he knew he couldn’t keep it to himself. He gave me a spin in the thinking tube too:

Thinking tube bonus feature: its figure-flattering properties completely disguise a 7-month preggo belly!
With new abilities to see color in depths and shades previously unknown by man, we were able to promptly select this color, Brigade by Olympic:

Now let me say that I’ve been a die-hard Valspar paint fan since we repainted almost our whole house. It covers better than everything else we tried – including more expensive brands like Benjamin Moore. But this time we went with Olympic and were excited to find that it’s low-odor AND low-VOC. Thumbs-up to you, Olympic. Well played.

Time to get painting! Usually we’d pick up some paint tray liners but we decided to try a new method: grocery bags.

It actually ended up working pretty well, though next time we’ll probably tape the bag to the paint tray to keep it from sliding. Score one for thriftiness!

We used a combination of small paint roller and this little paint tool that we’ve had around forever, since most of the painting was just edging inside the shelves.

Check it out, buds! Paint is happenin’!

Now I promise I’m not trying to be a complete jerk – I REALLY wanted to show you the whole wall painted. But we still have a little touching up to do, so it’s coming soon. In the meantime, please feel free to place your orders for thinking tubes in the comments section.