Spinning on the color wheel

I know it's just paint, but I still took a hefty armful of stuff into Home Depot today: four kinds of tile (green, blue and two accents), a couple of fabric cuttings, a chunk of granite and a section of cherry cabinet.

Overkill maybe, but in the hour or so I spent at the paint counter, it was gratifying to hear oohs and ahs about this going with that going with something else.

As happened at the tile store last month, a woman asked if I'd redo her house. I politely declined, because my plate is quite full enough, thank you very much.

In the end, I went home with five quarts of tinted paint, a quart of primer and a brush -- then primed in the morning and painted in the afternoon. The red is problematic because it's on white primer -- but I ended up doing two coats, which helps in judging it.

And here are the winners. If you want to see paint colors without my flashes twisting 'em, you can click into the Behr website.

In the main space on the first floor: Mellow Yellow, the top patch in the first picture, over Zinnia Gold, the bottom patch. The consensus: It's bolder, richer, less "faded," more oomph.

In the den and our bedroom: Daredevil. An intense and wonderful red, which will only get better over tinted primer.

In the master bath: Innuendo, a suprise winner in a pale orchid. It picks up so much of the iridescence of the accent tile that it's scary, though hard to see in a photo. (The greenboard -- waterproof drywall -- behind it doesn't do it any color favors either.)

And finally in the no-brainer category for the guest rooms and guest room baths: Desert Lily, a pale and wonderful yellow. The swatch I painted today was behind a scaffold in the kitchen, so I didn't get a good picture of it. But you don't even have to trust me on this one; it's a force of nature, especially with the tile.

And if you really want to see any of them in better values than I can produce here, you'll just have to come visit.