Painting your mom’s new pad is an honorable task.
But whatever you do, son, at least make sure it doesn’t end up looking like a**…
“So, Mom, what color would you like me to paint your walls?”
After making endless decisions-by-committee related to remodeling our Farmstead out in the country, I was more than happy to delegate one to an individual. No debating, no hemming and hawing, no compromise. Only one person’s opinion to consider. Could it possibly get any simpler than that?
And while my mother isn’t the most decisive person on the block, you gotta give her credit for recognizing that and at least attempting to mitigate it. The classic indecisive move here would have been, “I don’t care, whatever you want.” Which, of course, we all know is the most aggravating answer one might receive when attempting to consider the desires of another person.
Instead, what she did was pure genius: in her reply she added two tiny letters to that phrase and turned the paint world upside down: “I don’t care, whatever you wanted.”
“Yeah,” she continued, “whatever color it is that you have in your living room now will work for me up in the Loft.”
I couldn’t believe it–it was like music to my ears: a pre-made decision. Two years ago we had remodeled our house in town and in the process had much of it painted, which meant that I was pretty sure I had unequivocal evidence of our previous paint choice–a ‘light light beige/brown’, or, alternatively, an ‘off off-white’–either in my emails to the contractor, or in the form of a spare can of paint lying around in our garage.
Yup, there sure is something special about knowing exactly what you want.
And in this case, what we wanted was “HGSW2507 Paper Kraft”, to be exact…
“So I understand that this the Home Depot paint department–I saw the big orange sign out front when I came in–but is there any chance you could color match a paint code from, say, Lowe’s?”
I don’t know why I felt so silly asking the question, since pretty much any major home improvement place or paint store will color match any color from all the other major brands. In fact, that’s what happened the first time around. While “HGSW” in our code of interest stands for “HGTV by Sherwin Williams”, it’s actually Lowe’s that carries those colors, and not your local Sherwin Williams paint store. But when our contractor back in ’21 insisted on using Sherwin Williams, he had no problem getting them to whip up a batch of Paper Kraft.
My current dilemma centered around the fact that pretty much every can of paint sold by both Sherwin Williams and Lowe’s is loaded with crap-quality product. Or at least according to the Gospel of Consumer Reports Ratings. So I was dead-set on using something of much better quality, Behr Marquee–which as you may have already figured out, was sold by Home Depot.
“Of course, we can! What color did you need?” replied the older Jamacain emigre behind the paint desk.
A wave of relief washed over me. Here I had been fretting about how to get the right color–silly me! I had just wasted the last hour sitting in my car in the parking lot, perusing ‘Paint Color Matching’ websites, the whole while telling my two daughters “Patience, children! Daddy just needs a few more minutes to figure out what color to ask for…” a good 15+ times (side note: do I smell the childhood trauma wrought by too many broken parental promises brewing here? Indubitably).
“What are these Paint Color Matching websites of which you speak?” you ask? Well, in theory it sounds pretty simple: you tell the interwebs your color code and what brand of paint you would really like to use, and it tells you the name of the color that is the closest match in your chosen brand. It would be great if it actually worked, but usually you just end up more frustrated and confused than when you started.
If it did work, though, I feel like it is a much safer bet to do it this way, especially in our case where we didn’t need the paint for the Loft to be a perfect match to our living room walls in town. As my logic goes, at least if I ask Home Depot to give me their “Periwinkle Blue”, for example, I can be pretty sure I’m going to get what they advertise as Periwinkle Blue. However, if you ask them to interpret another company’s paint code, then there was much more room for error–and the possibility for the paint dude or dudette to point the finger at you in the case that things were to go awry.
“Great! Can I give you the paint code?” I asked her.
“No, no, just give me the name, and it will automatically pull up the code,” she replied.
“Okay, then, it’s ‘Paper Kraft’…” I paused for a moment, wondering if I should clarify that ‘Kraft’ begins with ‘K’ and not ‘C’ in this case.
“Ah, yes, here it is…HGSW2507?”
I glanced down at the note on my phone.
“Yes, 2507–that’s the one!” I confirmed with confidence.
Given that paint codes are unique, I could rest easy that we had successfully met the challenge of getting the exact color of paint I needed, from the brand that I wanted.
“Come back in about 10 minutes and that’ll be ready for you sir…”
“Huh, that’s odd. This seems a lot darker than I remember our walls at home being. Are you sure this is Paper Kraft?”
I stared at the little smear of color that they daub on the label of mixed paint cans so you can verify it looks as it should. And what should it look like on the cans of paint I was about to buy? Well, it didn’t look so much as an ‘off off-white’ but more of a ‘poopy crap-brown’.
“Yes, I’m absolutely sure that’s HGSW2507. That’s what you wanted, right?” she said with an air of no-nonsense.
“Yeah…” I just kept staring at it. Something seemed mighty amiss here. “…but that is waaaaaaay too dark. That can’t be it.”
“Oh, don’t worry it will get lighter as it dries,” she said, somewhat dismissively.
“Really? I don’t think it could possibly get light enough…”
“I assure you, sir, that it will get lighter,” she said firmly.
“Man, I really don’t remember our walls being this dark. Let me try to find a picture of our walls at home…”
She just stood there tapping her finger impatiently, while I discovered that I had taken exactly zero pictures in or near our living room in the past 3-4 months.
“Well?!?” she inquired indignantly.
“Ummm…well…I haven’t found a good pic of it yet,” I stammered nervously.
Was she gaslighting me, or was I crazy? Maybe our walls were darker than I seemed to recall? After all, what was she going to do if I asked her to do it again? She was going to use the exact same code, and therefore the exact same formula of various tints and hues, and we all knew we would end up with the same sh*t-brown that was guaranteed to “get lighter as it dries.”
“Trust me, it’s the right color–it’s the code you verified with me you wanted, and in the paint world, the code might as well be the Word of The Jesus” she assured me with a mix of confidence and impatience.
Not knowing what else to do–besides curse my early-onset dementia?–I took my 3 cans of dubious paint and headed to the checkout.
“She better be right about this,” I muttered to myself. “With all the progress tomorrow that my well-experienced buddy Matt assured me he and I would make on the Loft, we’re definitely going to need that paint ready to go…”
“Oh, son of a biscuit–I knew I wasn’t crazy!”
Back home, I decided the best way to check if I had the right color was to hold up the paint can next to my wall and take a picture.
And, you, too, would be dropping an adult potty word or two if you were staring at this:
That’s my living room wall in the background, and in the foreground, you can see the schmears o’sh*t that are clearly not even remotely close to being the same color.
Oh, and you can also see where I accidentally dropped the lid in the paint itself. Only moments earlier I had gone out into our garage and dug up the can of leftover paint we had from the 2021 remodel, and opened them both up to compare the two. You know, in the off chance that it was indeed really dark before drying to a much, much lighter white. (Spoiler alert: the paint in the older can was as Caucasian as they come.)
Well, at least the good news is that I wasn’t effin’ crazy. Bad news was that I was stuck with a color that almost made my poor mother vomit when she saw it–“It looks like a baby had diarrhea,” were her exact words, I believe–and I didn’t have the time to trek the 40 minutes each way to Home Depot and back just get the right color.
Oh, technology, how could have you possibly screwed me thusly? How?!?
‘Tis a mystery indeed. One that we will investigate next time. So stay tuned, Dear Readers! Because I know that you’re just dying to know how this one ends.
I’ll give you hint, at least. Until next time, I leave you with these cryptic words: way too many Roberts get involved…
Content created on: 20/22/23 July 2023 (Thurs/Sat/Sun)
You aren’t having much luck with hardware stores lately. For science-minded people like you and I, a code means one specific thing. That is way off!