(Or 45!) and drive down a country road in fall.
Spur of the moment.
Go ahead.
Do it.
It'll help you take a long, deep breath, and exhale slowly.
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October 2010
Becoming Home: A Paint Called Lovely
"Well, Fluffy."
That's what my grandma used to say to herself in a slightly exasperated tone when she realized that her brain had momentarily slipped into neutral.
We've all had those nice-house-nobody-home moments from time to time, right?
Right.
Somewhere along my finding Lovely (aka: finding-the-right-paint-color) journey, when the right shade of gray seemed so elusive, I thought to myself, "I wish I could just mix my own color!"
Well, Fluffy. How 'bout you do just that?
Fluffy, indeed! Why hadn't I thought of this before? (Um, I'll get back to you on that...)
Into Sherwin Williams I went with one of their paint color strips in hand. (I chose Sherwin Williams because it's the only specialty paint store in town - when you live near a small town, there aren't a lot of choices!) The darkest color on the strip had caught my eye, but it was far too dark for this application. So, after the Sherwin Williams paint color lady and I had had a wonderful conversation about pigment, formula, and tone, which involved computer print-out comparisons and this pigment vs. that pigment, I left with two samples: one of the exact formula for the darkest color on the strip that I so loved, a manually mixed sample of that color, half-toned, and a handful of stir sticks. (Tip of the day: Did you know that the lighter colors on paint color strips aren't necessarily lighter shades of the darkest color? It's true.)
Back home I went, ready for even more mixing. To the wall, I painted sample patches of the lightest and darkest colors, plus three different ratios of the two mixed together.
Guess what? I found my color!
And, oh my, we love this color! Grays can be so tricky (so can browns, if you've ever tried) - they can lean blue or purple (or even green!) very easily, causing them to go cold. But this one has enough ocre and black in it to keep it nice and warm. Yes!
If you're interested in the nitty gritty details of the exact shade of gray that I used, here they are:
The dark color is: SW 7016, Mindful Gray.
The lighter color is a manually cut 50% formula of Mindful Gray (I stress manual cut because the computer's 50% cut gave us completely different pigments - here's where a knowledgeable paint person is invaluable!) and the formula is:
Custom Manual Match
BAC Colorant oz 32 64 128
B1- Black 14 1 1
R2- Maroon 1 1
Y3- Deep Gold 11
One Gallon-A29W01851 Extra White 650190184
At home, the final color choice ended up being a 4:1 ratio of light to dark. In other words, Fluffy, in a large bucket, mix one gallon of the light gray and one quart of Mindful gray together, and there you have it!
You've found Lovely.
Becoming Home: Finding Lovely
Oy.
That painting.
It about ate my lunch, but I prevailed in the end, and now a beautiful coat of the most lovely of warm-toned grays is covering the walls in our living room, hall, laundry, and kitchen. (Yes, I said kitchen!)
"What?" you say.
"Didn't you just paint your kitchen not too long ago?"
"Why, yes. Yes, I did," I reply.
Then, while you're shaking your head in utter disbelief, I continue:
"Do you remember the thing that I said some time ago, something along the lines of choosing a wall color that will give you a room you love, and one that loves you back? Remember that? Well, the first go at a lovely gray kitchen turned out to be a lovely gray-green kitchen. It was lovely. But not the lovely I was searching for. It was so close, yet so far from the lovely, that I had to keep on going until I found it."
And I'm so glad I did (although the very idea may have caused some adults to freak out and some children to roll their eyes), because this color, this one, loves me back!
Tomorrow, I'll write the whole color story for you, including all the details, so stay tuned.
But today? Today, I'll be happily putting the paint brushes away!
