I’m currently helping my aging
mother, who will henceforth be known as “Mom,” with rehabilitating her “new”
home. This new home is actually an old
home that needed lots of TLC, and I don’t mean tables, ladders, and chairs.
My Mom is fastidious in that she
is – well, hard to please. But, in the
matter of paint, her tastes would seem to be a breeze.
She likes paint in the color
white. I’m not going to get into an
artistic argument with questions like, “Is ‘white’ a color?” Back in second grade, Janice M., who sat
across the aisle from me, corrected Sister Mary about white and its status as a
color. Who really cares? Just relax and read on.
Shopping for paint should be easy
since all the hard work of selecting the color is done. A trip to the paint store was much more
surprising than I anticipated.
I knew I wanted the walls,
ceilings, and trim moulding, white.
“Thirty-two?” I asked with
amazement.
 |
| One of the more popular colors of white available |
“Yes, there are 32 different
shades of white,” informed the paint clerk.
Much to my bemusement, there are even more from which to choose if you
count all the different finishes.
Much along the way of Forrest
Gump’s shrimp, you can find white in Arctic flat, Arctic semi-gloss, and Arctic
gloss, among a whole lot of other colors.
It seems as though I don’t do
nearly enough painting to escape appearing like a painting virgin inside a
paint supermarket.
White for the walls should be
flat. Period. Unless there is some skim coat that needs to
be initially covered, the paint should be flat.
If you introduce a prior-painted wall with a color, that color needs to
be covered with a primer, also in white.
The only other exception is in the case of a stain left behind by
mastic; that stain should first be painted with a product called Kilz.
For those keeping track, first
apply Kilz, then white primer, next white flat paint. Two or more coats may be needed
thereafter. That would result in 4 to
5-coats of liquid wall covering.
Not being cheap, I was also
shocked to learn that each can of cheap paint cost between $26 and $32 per
gallon.
Just when I thought I had the
problem of purchasing paint under control, I found that none of what I just
bought would work on ceilings.
Evidently, ceilings need some anti-gravity paint in “ultra white” in
order to remain off the floor.
It seems as though paint
supermarkets conveniently have calculators to cipher the amount of paint you
need buy. The formula is something like:
length x width of each wall, totaled together, plus the length x width of the
ceiling, divided by your birth date, plus Thursday x $32 per gallon = $467 per
room. It should be noted that none of
that $26 paint mentioned above will work for Mom.
After schlepping 311 gallons of
paint, worth roughly $112,348, to Mom’s house, I realized I forgot that blue
masking tape to prevent painting areas that should not be painted. It only took 17 rolls to do the job. After all, you don’t want your white paint to
bleed into the white ceiling or white trim.
It didn’t take long to roll-on
the paint and get a nice clean look. The
hardest part of painting was figuring out which paint was for the walls, which
was for the moulding, and which paint should be used for the ceilings.
Opening the blinds and windows to
ventilate the place resulted in a second-degree sunburn from all the white
reflecting the light. But, it’s clean
and she’s happy.
