Paint!

Benjamin Moore Classic Colors paint fan

My 10 paints

Living/Dining Room in Navajo White

Stonington Grey in bedroom

Lancaster White on Trim and Kitchen Cabinets

Linen White in Master Bathroom

Coventry Gray in Hall Bathroom

We all know how transformative a few good gallons of paint can be on a wall.  Everyone says it's the cheapest way to reinvent a space. No one mentions that it can also be the hardest.  A couple of months ago my contractor dropped off two Benjamin Moore paint fans:  Classic Colors and Color Preview.  In all, BM offers a staggering 3,400 colors.  By contrast, the esteemed British paint and wallpaper company Farrow & Ball offers an edited collection of 132.  132...well, now that seems quite reasonable.   For me, looking at thousands of paint colors, many of which are too similar for the eye to differentiate, is a recipe for insanity.  So, I ordered Farrow & Ball's brochure of 132 colors.  I fell in love.  I loved their paint so much that I bought some sample pots and also bought their latest book, Living with Color, a gorgeous coffee table book full of inspiring homes, mostly in the British countryside, painted with their almost too perfect paints.  That book became my addiction.  I studied its pages as if it were a text book that held all of the answers.  But at $85 a gallon plus shipping, I never intended to buy their paint.  I just wanted a reliable guide for conceiving my color plan for the house.  

In the end, after hours and hours of studying paint chips and buying dozens of Benjamin Moore $3 paint samples at my local paint store, I narrowed down my selection to 10 paints:  5 shades of off white and 5 shades of deeper neutrals.   Here is the list:  Linen White, Navajo White, White Dove, Ancient Ivory, Lancaster White, Stonington Gray, Coventry Gray, Richmond Gray, Revere Pewter and Arctic Shadows.  Most of my choices came from the BM Historical colors collection, a relatively small collection of colors that were very fitting for my 1901 house.

I will confess that the paint selection was far harder than I anticipated despite the fact that there is absolutely nothing daring about my selection nor do I have any expectation that anyone will notice the subtle variation in the shades of white throughout the house.  Nevertheless, I am still enjoying the relief of having made my decisions and watching the house transform, one room at a time.  My last selection will be next week when they move to the exterior.  Thankfully, the house is mostly brick, but we are repainting the  windows and soffits the same black and white scheme that was there when we bought the house.  The only new paint that we are adding to the palette is a dash of color on the wrap around porch.  In the southern tradition of painting porch ceilings "haint blue",  I am going to have to find the perfect shade of pale blue for our porch ceiling.   Tradition promises that a blue ceiling will ward off any evil spirits and keep away the bugs, which is just enough incentive to send me back to the paint store.