Paint

So this weekend I shopped for paint, I painted, I shopped for paint some more and I painted some more. My front door now looks like a Leprechauns quilt.

I went out Friday night and found a whopping six shades of green that I thought looked like contenders. HGTV Magazine raved about one shade in particular and the picture of it in the magazine looked like a real winner. I was very excited that my Local Lowes had all the colors I wanted, even the two that had been "archived" and were no longer actively in rotation.

Saturday, with great excitement, I put tests on the door! No backing out now, this door will be painted! ( and stripped and sanded and primed) but still excited!

Wow. less excited. Some of these looked so much better in their swatches! I had no idea 3 and 5 were so fugly! I would have never brought them home from the store had they looked that blah! Live and learn - always buy samples and test them out before you buy!

So two down quickly. That's good. 1 I liked, 2 seems to be a little cheap looking, I'm not feeling it, 5 is nice, still feeling 5, it's a contender, 4 reads a little camo.

I'm liking but not loving these shades. I need to love it. This door is going to be a big job and I;m not going to do all that work for "like". I went back to the store, this time a different store.

The top three are not all the same color. They are also not all neon, 8 and 9 or probably close to neon, but they aren't . 7 is by far my favorite. It has pop, its bright and its visible from the street. Its also a happy green - not all greens are happy, some are very sad and others seem happy but are disingenuous .

The new paints make the old paints look very drab and dark and sad and not at all what I was looking for. I don't want drab! I want Pop! and Vividness! I want a door that radiates zest! I want a door you can see from the street through the storm door. I want  a color that says Hi! I Am The Front Door! How! Are! You!

The presumptive  winning color is Key Lime, 27D-5 by Clark + Kensington, who are too precious to let me put their swatch here.

Below is my mud room, and it's now clean floor. "Why did you finally clean that awful space?" you ask, "Did you get tired of its crummy appearance?  Were you finally humiliated by it?"

No. Its a mud room and I don't spend enough time in the space to care about its appearance. I cleaned it because I spilled about 2/3 of a can of bright green paint "Lucky Charm Green", by Benjamin Moore on the floor  and it made an enormous mess that had to be cleaned up immediately - and it was, but now I had a very clean section and the untouched section and that looked weird so I cleaned it all.

Ace is the place that charges you a lot and then gives you too much paint in their samples, Lowe's is the place with reasonable sample sizes in screw top containers. Hurmph.