As he spread the newspaper pages out he found himself drawn to reading, or re-reading some of the stories. Some he had missed, and some were actually funny now that a week or so had passed since Election Day and the results were in and certified. So and so who looked like a slam dunk didn't win, or the underdog indeed finished like a beaten dog.
Re-reading the papers can slow up the paint project, but you can gain some new knowledge. As I have embarked recently on painting the shed, I hadn't realized that an Italian man won the 100 meter dash at the 2020 Olympics, of course recently held in 2021 in Tokyo due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I also didn't know there are 10,000 shades of white paint. I recently read someone developed the whitest white paint. Maybe that now means there are 10,001 shades of white paint.
I try and read the WSJ A-Hed pieces, and even if I've fallen behind on keeping up with the print editions I get delivered, I try and isolate the A-Hed pieces for must reading later
Thus, I was surprised, but happy, to be spreading newspaper pages out to clean brushes when I came across one of the WSJ inimitable A-Hed pieces by Melissa Korn, "Cotton Balls, Snowflake or Static? Decision Seems Make-or-Break. Proliferation of nearly identical shades of white paint stupefies home decorators." that I had clearly missed.
Ms Korn points out what the lockdown DIYs have discovered about painting anything around the home or apartment—there are A LOT of colors to choose from.
Thankfully, no one paint store offers all 10,001 shades of white. Ms Korn tells us "Benjamin Moore offers a collection of 152 of the 'most requested off-white colors...' Behr's website lists 167 white options. PPG, which owns the Glidden line, has 315 at Home Depot." Thank goodness for small favors.
I have probably been painting home surfaces inside and out since I was 10. I'm now 72 and still wield a brush or roller when needed. I watched and helped my father suffer through painting ceilings in the 1950s with a brush, since no one told him about 9 inch rollers.
And then when he caught on with a roller, he didn't know about using a pole to attach the roller handle to and work from the floor to paint a ceiling, rather than climbing up and down on a ladder that had to be constantly moved. The learning curve in my house was huge.
But that's how I learned; watching the learning curve unfold until now I have to say I've been a state-of-the-art house painter for decades.
The only white surfaces in our house are the ceilings. And they are painted unfailingly with "ceiling white" paint. No swatch selections. Just however many gallons of ceiling white that I need. Door and baseboard trim is just white, perhaps "semi-gloss, linen white." I do not get paralyzed by the choices, as the people described in the A-Hed piece do. But then again, they are making rookie mistakes.
There is a great scene in the Cary Grant, Myrna Loy movie "Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House" where Myrna tells the contractor that she wants a shade of green for maybe the sewing room of the still being constructed house to be matched to the green found on a can of peas at the A.& P. (A now long defunct supermarket.)
She goes on and on to the contractor about yellows and reds that can be found on other cans and in nature. The contractor listens politely, removes the cigar from his mouth, and when Myrna is out of earshot tells his assistant: "green, yellow, red." Case closed.
Think of what choices she could have presented the contractor with if she was armed with all the shades on display now. The movie would need an intermission.
My father hit on the off-white fad in the late 50s when he saw that the apartments being built in NYC were using plasterboard painted white rather than the outgoing method of building walls with a wood lath and plaster combination. Plastering as a building trades skill was going the way of prefabricated gypsum board nailed to studs and finished off with tape and a white spackle, painted over with a sort of cheap whitewash. The resulting color was decidedly off-white, yours to do what you want with.
As a kid, I remember the advertising taken out by the plasterers' union on the Third Avenue buses that rolled past the flower shop that boldly told you to KEEP NEW YORK PLASTERED. Some took this to have a double meaning. On Third Avenue, there were plenty of bars to get started on that endeavor.
Thus, every room in our house in Flushing was painted using an off-white shade. It seemed then there was only one off-white, so the selection process was easy. My father came home with gallons of off-white paint and rolled away.
The conniptions the people described in Ms. Korn's piece have at choosing a color are comically—at least to me. But they do ring true. My daughter Susan and her husband Greg have recently bought a home and I think there were at least 5 color swatches on the dining room wall before they decided on the color they finally used. It looks nice. And that they only worked from 5 choices is admirable.
I like the couple that now laugh at themselves over their protracted indecision in choosing a color for the bathroom. Ms. Korn tells us "the two have been married for 12 years and laugh about the absurdity of their indecision. Ms. Ahmed joked online that the two choices were 'as different as day and seconds later that day.'"
My advice to anyone choosing a color is to think fast, choose, and live with it. It won't kill you. Now picking out wallpaper, that's a whole other story. Bring a change of clothes when you start to go over all those sample books.
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