Indecision 2010, Part 2

I am on vacation this week with the goal of getting things organized, painted, and hung throughout the condo. This being said, I need to make all of my paint decisions before my trip to Home Depot tonight. Here are the two big ones:

Every time that we have a party, I wake up the next morning to a breakfast bar that looks like this:

People's jeans and shoes rub off on the wall. My Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and I are starting to wear down the cheap developer-grade paint in the area. I've decided an easy fix would be to repaint it using better paint; however, I don't want to risk trying to color-match the paint to the paint used throughout the house, so I'm taking the lazy way out and intentionally painting it a new color. I tried to pick "Andy Colors," but he seems so-so on all of them. I think that we're going to go with the third from the left -- the dark gold color.

The paint colors in yesterday's post are for our 2nd bedroom/office/craft room/guest room/etc. room. I've spent $15 on gray paint samples across the gray spectrum and just couldn't find one that was right - everything's either too blue or too purple. I was all set on orange until I received an e-mail from a friend today telling me how much she dislikes her orange basement. Now I'm second-guessing myself again. I'm going to spend my lunch break going through my inspiration files and books to identify common characteristics. For now, here are the finalists, which look much, much more fluorescent in my crappy iPhone photo than in person.

I'd bag it and go with yellow, but I don't want to have to repaint if I pop out an ankle-biter with a wiener when the time comes. Everyone always says paint is cheap, but every time I've painted, it's cost an arm and leg. I think that painting is cheap and easy for people who have the luxury of utility sinks and basements for storing tarps, brushes, trays, and buckets for reuse.