Patience is key in many situations. Up until last week I didn’t realize how important patience is in saving time and making accurate decisions.
Let me explain.
The upper level of our story and ¾ home has interesting textured paneling. Not only is it textured, but it covers all of the walls and the ceiling in the hallway. Oh, and it’s painted mint green, along with the beautiful historic trim that frames the window and door frames.
We just had the window in the hallway replaced and so the trim would have to be painted to cover up some of the blemishes that happened during the replacement. What a great excuse to take some time to paint the mint green trim back to its glorious white!
Do you know how many shades of “white” there are when it comes to paint? There are enough to make your head spin. I propped up many different shades of paint chips against the window frame: warm whites and cool whites and stared at them for weeks, but I just couldn’t make this decision on my own.
I have a wonderful friend who is an interior designer and when I struggle to choose paint colors she brings over paint decks from every brand available, then quickly and easily chooses the perfect color. I would have called her right away but I wasn’t really in a hurry to get everything rolling.
That changed one day last week; all of a sudden I had to pick that paint color. I needed a little break from all of the writing and I thought painting the trim would be a perfect time out.
I decided to stop wavering in my decision making process and I just picked a white. It was called “Silent White” and of course the associate at my favorite hardware store talked me into saving money by buying a gallon of it. I figured I had a lot of trim to paint.
In my rush to get this project started I neglected to think about using a heavy-duty paint primer to cover that mint green. Nope. Instead I got five coats into the white paint and thought, “Wow, this isn’t really working the greatest.” Also as I was painting I noticed that the white seemed really bright. I talked myself out of that thought, rationalizing that anything lighter than the mint green was going to look different and take time to get used to.
Let me tell you, white on the trim does look a lot better. However, I now recognize that it’s not quite the right white. My designer friend returned my phone call about an hour too late but assured me that she had the perfect trim color picked out and that I could just consider those multiple coats of white as a primer.
As usual, my husband makes jokes about another situation where my lack of patience shines. Just as we were about to drift off to sleep that night, he commented that the trim in the hallway was so bright that it was glowing in the dark.
A glowing home update? I guess so.