My favorite neutral is Ellen Kennon's Taupe. It is just perfect!

I am thinking of asking Lowe's to just junk this paint and getting Valspar Woodrow Wilson Putty instead.

You don't have a BM store in your area? You will never get the right match @ Blows

BM 1527 Going to the Chapel is the lightest on that strip, but I think if you want more of the beige and a little less of the greenish grey, you might try jumping the next strip over to BM Hushed Hue - 1520.

Threed, I have seen you recommend Ellen Kennon's Taupe on other threads, and it looks gorgeous in your rooms. But I have sunk too much $$ into samples already, and am too indecisive, to go with mail-order paint at this point. Same reason that C2 and Donald Whoever and Farrow and Ball are not options for me.

Christophern, I hear you, but Lowe's is the best I'm going to get.

Basically, the situation is this: I live in a little town, in a poor region of the US, where the only BM store is a full hour's drive away. Not doing that. So my options are HD, Lowe's, Sherwin Williams, and Dunn Edwards. For a while I thought I'd go w/SW paint. But in the paler shades they can't get the sample quarts to match the real color -- too little pigment, and their computer can't break it down sufficiently, and evidently no one in there gives a darn about or is good at matching color for the samples.

So I am stuck with:
--Lowe's, which can't really match BM colors but which tries, and their Valspar paint is really nice
--SW, which has pretty colors but I can't sample them b/c the samples are often quite far from the actual color that'd come out of the gallon
--HD, where I thought I'd found a good color in the RL line, but then it turned out that the gallons they mixed me were really different from the sample quart I'd used to make the decision, and they couldn't figure out how or why it was different
--Dunn Edwards, haven't gone in there yet but am not eager to have another frustrating paint experience in a new store

Hence my frustration. Hence my partially painted wall, once again. Hence my desire to just pick a Behr (HD) or Valspar (Lowe's) color and be done with the whole damn thing at this point.

I would note that almost all the paint guys I've been dealing with are neither the sharpest knives in the drawer nor at all talented at matching paint, and they treat me like I'm slightly mad. WHich I suppose I am, at this point. So I guess I can't really blame them.