Remember how I told you we embarked on a major kitchen renovation project over Christmas? Well, the construction part is done and now it’s time to paint.

During our vacation in Anna Maria Island this summer, I fell in love with a vase and a set of coral-colored seahorse salt-and-pepper shakers and decided that they’d be my inspiration for a new kitchen makeover.

As you can see, the existing wall color in the background needed some work. The kitchen is one of two rooms that we didn’t touch when we bought our house almost 8 years ago (gah!). It’s time. For the past several years, the theme of the kitchen has been roosters and palm trees (a little random I know — but it was all inspired from a picture I bought during our first trip to Key West when we were first dating. Ah, those blissful days when we could just up and take a vacation, but I digress).

After purchasing the vase and seahorses, I decided to head in more of a beach direction. For years, I’ve spotted items that I love and always thought, “Oh, maybe someday we’ll have a beach house and that would be so cute in its kitchen.” But then one day I thought, “Why do I need to wait for something that may never occur? I mean, I DO live in Florida.” So even if Orlando is landlocked, we’re going to have a beach kitchen.

Using the vase as a starting point, I knew I wanted to have blue walls. Here’s one of my favorite inspiration pics I found online:

(SOURCE)

Gorg, huh? I excitedly called DadJovi over to the computer to show him, and the first thing he said was, “No way. Those are UNC colors.” In case you’re new to Jovi family, DadJovi is a Duke grad and mega Cameron Crazy. He hates all things UNC, apparently including the color light blue. (Side note: lately, to go along with his stories to E. during Christmas that the Blue Devil is Santa’s BFF, he’s been telling her that the Tar Heel hates Christmas and birthdays. Someday she’ll need a lot of therapy).

Anyway, after arguing over theoretical shades of blue, we decided the best thing to do was head to Home Depot and start getting some samples. If history is any guide, we knew we’d be getting a lot of samples. When painting E’s room when I was still (very) pregnant, I think we went through 9 pinks before we settled on one. Every other one looked like Pepto. But then we finally found the perfect shade of barely pink.

Lordy, I feel swollen just looking at that.

We started with a couple blues, one light, one dark. We’re also painting the rim around our raised ceiling. Given my love of the seahorses, I wanted to paint it coral but DadJovi and others suggested tan. We got one of each.

Luckily we had some help when it came to painting.

I immediately loved the lighter one (Blue Feather). At first we sort of liked the darker one, but the more we examined it, the more cartoonish we thought it was. But for DadJovi, the light blue just couldn’t even be considered. “Nope, no way. It’s UNC blue. I can’t live in a house with a UNC kitchen. Are you trying to hurt me.” I guess it’s not just about paint.

The coral and the tan were disasters.

So, for — and I’m not kidding — hours last night, DadJovi tooled around on the Behr website, making the blue darker, then lighter, brighter, more green, more yellow, you name it. I think it’s important at this point to share something about DadJovi — he’s color blind. Yup, the person who cares the most passionately about which shade of blue we’re painting our kitchen can’t even see every color on the color wheel. For the life of him, he can’t tell the difference between green and brown, for example. But. like Mark Zuckerberg, the color he sees best is blue. And dammit, he was going to rock the blue selection.

With his highly technical choices for colors, I went back to Home Depot today and picked up samples for Horizon Haze and Riviera Blue. Since we had so many blues, we had to start using letters to remember which was which. Back to the wall …

I also chose two sand colors from the yellow family instead of the brown family.

Once again, we were divided. I liked (although didn’t love) Pismo Dunes on the left. DadJovi liked Banana Creme on the right. I liked it too but I was afraid that it was too light, especially since we have a white molding and a white ceiling. (By the way, don’t you just LOVE color names? I’d love to be the person who comes up with names for paint and nailpolish colors).

By this point, we were so tired of going over samples so we decided to take a bold step. Using just the color sample card, we picked the shade darker than Banana Creme and decided to just to ahead and buy Applesauce for the rim.

But we still couldn’t agree on a blue. Back to the Behr site. Armed with yet more colors, DadJovi headed back to Home Depot once again for more samples.

He came back armed with the Applesauce and armed with what he was sure was “the one” — Ocean Dream. Wall, please:

In case you’ve lost track of the blues (and who can blame you?), the newest blue was the one in the middle, the sort of swooping looking one. Immediately, Ocean Dream became DadJovi’s favorite. And after going back and forth several times, I decided that our original pick, Blue Feather, was my favorite one.

So we were in a stalemate — I wanted the “UNC color” and DadJovi wanted Ocean Dream, which I was convinced was too purple-y for a beach kitchen.

It was time to bring in some outside eyes. I texted a picture to my mom and to my pal Katy. My mom was at happy hour, so she polled the whole bar. When the votes were in, I came out ahead. But then, in the 11th hour, a dark horse emerged.

So which did we pick? You’ll just have to wait and see.

But by this point, you may be wondering what our very active 2-year-old was doing during all this heavy debate. If you have any doubts about how much children know what’s going on at home, I give you exhibit A:

She’s “painting” her polar bear cave (as she calls her tent) with Q-Tips. Kids do the darndest things.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Great Kitchen Makeover Project of 2011 and find out which color came out on top.