When we chose the paint for the new bathroom, we picked a white and bought a gallon. Now, people think that white is white but walk into anyplace that sells paint and you'll see paint chips in white that spans everything from stark, snowy white to creamy near yellow, almost beige and dang near grey. There are a thousand whites to choose from in a wide spectrum from cool to warm, from blueish to pinkish...there's no such thing as just white, although there may very well be a color called "Just White". It's probably got green in it.
I recently fell in love with Gossamer Blue (Benjamin Moore) so last week I bought a gallon and began to slowly transform my office. It's going to take several weeks because I'm only going to do one wall at a time. My office is packed with stuff. In the front room, where my drawing board is and I do most of my work, I have 3 cupboards of varying size, five book cases stuffed with books, cans of paint, resource materials (like calendars; great photos), and 3 or 4 dozen large portfolios holding designs and a long, low double file cabinet where I keep the smaller designs; thousands of drawings of Christmas ornaments, eyeglass cases, wall hangings and everything you can make out of needlepoint. 47 years worth of designs take up a lot of space. My point? All that furniture has to be moved so I can paint the walls behind it.
I can only do one wall at a time.
The room has a weird shape, as it's basically a transformed attic. When it was finished, a bump out was added to make room for a bathroom. When we moved in, 30 years ago, the bathroom was a nice, serviceable room for the kids. Toilet, tub, sink; nothing fancy. When we began riding the housing bubble in the mid 90s, one of the things we did was fix up that bathroom. We put in some beautiful tile and an antique clawfoot tub. It's my personal bath and it's lovely, feminine and serene. I clean it very often because I use it to wash out my brushes and I don't want the paint to stain the porcelain, so I scrub it out at least twice a week. Once upon a time, the room was carpeted but I ripped that all up when I moved in, exposing the ancient linoleum underneath. I love that lino so much! It's hideous, so it doesn't matter how much paint I slop on it; it's indestructible and if we ever decide to sell, all we have to do is carpet the place and no one will ever know what lies beneath. I keep the center of the room well swept so that when I roll out canvas for cutting, I don't have to worry about accidentally getting my canvas dirty.
But I almost never dust anything in my office and I haven't moved any of the furniture in...ten years? So...moving the furniture has entailed much dusting, sweeping, vacuuming and scrubbing. It's disgusting and I've been sneezing and coughing since I started. My sinuses are full of dust that hasn't moved since GWB was in office. I probably should be wearing a full on hazmat suit for this job but I'm not. It'll probably kill me and I'm okay with that. I kind of like the idea of people sadly saying "she was right; when she finally did some housework, it killed her."
Oh, I should probably point out that before I moved up into this space, it was Zack's bedroom. When he moved in at the age of six, I asked him how he'd like it done and he asked for red, white and blue. So I painted the walls white, with a red striped border and the window trim in dark blue with stars stenciled on. In the window cubby, I went to town.
Six years later, when I moved in, I had some fun and painted the other walls of the room with whatever odds and ends of paint I had around the house. I've collected paint for years, using it on furniture, floors, walls; anything. I used to peruse the oops! shelf at Home Depot and different decorator stores in my neighborhood. Free gallons of paint in colors I could use for work were a Godsend. Over the years, I've painted bedrooms and bathrooms more times than I can remember with paint I got for free. Now I'm old and can afford to buy the colors I actually want. Its awesome.
It took me the better part of a week to clear out that tiny window cubby. The double file cabinet (which is in the foreground of the photo above) goes under the window. Against the red wall I keep a six foot tall bookcase. The whole attic has a gabled ceiling so there's very little wall space for anything that tall. That's the case I keep some of my favorite, most used resource books; several fully illustrated Beatrix Potter books, two different coffee table books on the covers of Vogue magazine, stuff like that. Also, my collection of Georgette Heyer books, everything I own of Mark Helprin and two double packed shelves of vintage Reader's Digests, all of which have John G. Hubbell's byline in them. In the few inches between end of the file cabinet and the wall, I stacked a couple of drawing boards, some bare canvases, a couple of oddly sized frames and a big, cardboard folder which turned out to hold some gorgeous posters my parents gave me when they moved out of the big house on Queen Ave. There were three posters; all really good prints of paintings that hang in the national museum.
Talk about a distraction!
I couldn't go on until I'd perused my collection of frames to see if I had anything that would fit these beauties! I found one right away: a hideous painting of a golf hole I bought years ago at an estate sale just for the frame. Frames are insanely expensive so when I can get one for under $20.00 I buy it. This horror hung in a corner of my office for years, just waiting for a chance to be useful. Even the mat was the right size! So I cleared a space on the floor and dismantled the whole thing, put the new poster in it and put it all back together. Now a really good reproduction of A Young Girl, Reading by Jean-Honore Fragonard hangs on my living room wall. Naturally, I had to re-arrange all my walls to make space for her. This lead me to taking down pieces I've grown tired of, move others around, regroup them...some I moved into other rooms and a couple I brought up stairs. Eventually I did finish painting that window cubby and I hung new art on those walls.
That's Gossamer Blue where the red used to be. When I finished working that first day, I ran down stairs to wash out my brush in the laundry sink in the basement. I don't wash brushes that big in my beautiful bathroom. As I went through the kitchen, I couldn't help but notice...
Gossamer Blue looked just like the color on my kitchen walls, which I painted two years ago with Watery, by Sherwin Williams.
Now, if you had asked me to describe these two colors, I would have said that Watery was a lovely, soft aqua, leaning toward green, that reminds me of the color of the Caribbean Sea when we were in Antigua. Gossamer Blue, while the same general tone, was a slightly less saturated, more neutral tone with more blue in it; the color of the predawn sky in summer.
Under the artificial lights in my kitchen, they looked exactly the same.
Now, I'm not at all surprised that I would keep choosing the same color. But remember; I picked Gossamer Blue based on the white end of the color chip.
I do love the way my kitchen looks but I was very happy to discover the next morning that Gossamer Blue did in fact dry bluer. It's not exactly the same. When Josie ( my color expert) came and saw it she immediately said "they're not the same at all."
She (and I) may be the only ones who can see the difference but that's good enough for me.