Shades of White

We need new siding and a paint job on our house.  Once we recovered from learning the cost, we had to decide on what kind of siding which was no big deal since this came under Pat's jurisdiction.  But the paint choice involved a tedious struggle requiring many miles of cruising around looking at people's house colors, the hiring and meeting with a professional colorist, several trips to the paint store, and, finally, painting one side of the house four different colors for voting purposes. Other struggles:  Trim, garage and front door colors. I know this doesn't really sound too bad, but each step of the choosing process has its own land mine of possible explosions.

First, the driving around neighborhoods makes people suspicious.  You have to drive really slowly and stare fixedly at houses with potential choices of paint schemes.  People don't take well to this kind of activity.  They probably think we're casing the area for good sites to burglarize. I kept telling Pat to, "Hurry up!  They're gonna call the cops on us!"

Second, the hiring of a "professional colorist" involves eyeballing colors of paint samples that most of us wouldn't consider suitable for dog houses unless those animal homes were  located deep inside a nearby heavily forested area. It finally dawned on us that these professionals are far more interested in presenting trendy new shades that are a.) the color of their personal houses or b.) colors of houses that you'd see on HGTV. The one she said would be just perfect for our house looks vaguely like the color of new and understated camouflage hunting fabric. It wasn't a good match for our cottage/ranch style home. 

Next, come the uncounted number of trips to the paint store. I challenge you to find a more boring retail establishment.  There is nothing, NOTHING for women to look at of any interest whatsoever.  You even get tired of looking at paint chips even if they do have catchy names like "watermelon winter" or  "Steen Mountain white sheep."  That brings up the color family that will actually make your brain circuits short out:  WHITE. Unless you've looked for paint yourself, you will be astounded at the number of whites there are. Once you settle on three or four color possibilities, the fun of a paint store is totally gone and remember, it wasn't such a thrill to begin with. While Pat got himself absorbed in looking for rollers, paint trays and other needed equipment, I tried to strike up a conversation with a couple of the young employees who were probably students of mine at one time.  They were polite, friendly and quite interesting but kept needing to leave our conversation to go mix paint or answer painting questions. I was finally able to maintain a grip on my sanity after I found an old copy of a Pottery Barn catalog.  I went through it twice.

We went straight home and Pat painted three large sample areas on the side of the house.  We stared at them silently for several minutes.  Neither one of us was struck with any kind of certainty except that we could definitely and absolutely eliminate the military style color suggested by the colorist. Pat finally admitted that he liked the color on the far left but wished it were "slightly more brown." I could barely tell the difference between that color and the one next to it. So the next morning found us paying another visit to our new friends at Sherwin-Williams where Adam assured us that he could custom mix the color Pat described.  And so he did.  And so Pat painted another sample. I still can't tell the difference but with the new paint, named "slightly more brown" by the way, I could be happy with either of the samples on the far left.

You'll probably recognize yourself in this experience if you've ever done any house painting, and if you don't, you won't be surprised at the twists in your thought process when you do face a house color updating project.  It's even harder than you think it's going be.