Lately it seems like almost every night and weekend we are wandering around frightening places like this:

But why are home improvement stores so frightening?

Well… everything in them is at least 3-6X more expensive than anything you would find in an American home improvement store. Basically, places like this scare the pants off me because everything related to home improvement is incredibly expensive and every time we walk out we have a 300-600CHF bill it seems.

Still, we want to paint some accent walls in our flat now that we finally own the place, so after choosing colors in Photoshop, we stopped by to pick up paint swatches and then we accidentally found an outdoor table and chairs set on deep discount…

That was another 480CHF down the drain… yikes! See what I mean about these places being dangerous??

Back at home, I taped up the paint swatches in the rooms to get an idea of the color. It was hard to tell at night, so we would have to wait until the day time to really check out what the colors would be, but it was interesting to see how different they looked at home than in the store.

Kay has never painted a room and while we are only doing one wall in each color and not an entire room, the process is a tiny bit exciting.

Like I mentioned earlier, we are planning on doing a green accent wall in the kitchen, but only up in the corner way up high, like Kay saw at his friend’s house.

Kay had originally thought the middle swatch was the best in the store, but on the wall he wasn’t so sure. We would have to wait until morning to find out.

As for the living room, Kay has set up his Philips Hue lights, so he actually played around with how the purple would look with all the different light combinations we will be able to do in the room and it was quite interesting to see how the color on the walls reacts to blue light, red, green, pink, etc. Some of the purples looked almost black in certain lighting and so even though it was dark, I think seeing the purple in the various lighting options helped us narrow down which swatch we wanted.

How do you swatch colors? Mini cans of paint are over 22CHF ($23.8) a can and I cannot imagine spending 150CHF just to get some paint samples. Again, prices in Swiss home improvement stores terrify me! 🙂