My dream kitchen, the one I want to put in when we buy a condo here, is bright & sunny yellow, with all open storage—glasses hanging bar-style under the cookbook shelf and deep indigo/purple “shadows” on the pegboard to show what goes where.

The kitchen we actually have for the next year, in the apartment I just signed a lease on, is this. It is hilariously opposite the one in my mind’s eye.

I want to do an “opposites attract” kind of thing, with a rough, chunky table, bright color on the walls & above that backsplash, and maybe a goofy lemon-lime print on the chair seats. But I don’t do grey, really don’t know how to pick the right shade to go with this. The swatches here are colors I’m considering. As you can tell, I’m all over the map. Can any of you grey aficionados suggest which direction I want to go? Or does anyone know of a thing that would match up this grey to a paint shade, so I could see what colors the companies suggest pairing with it?

If you can help, examples would be better than color names—“mango tango” can mean all sorts of yellow/orange/gold shades, the 3rd pic here is what Behr calls lime green. It looks nothing like the lime I have in my fridge. I’ve noticed the same thing with berry colors—colors can look vastly different from the things they’re named after. But if you show me, i can probably figure it out.

Thanks in advance!