Wednesday, February 27, 2008

How to scare your neighbors.

Updated with pinky weirdness.

Today, over at the crapshack - the outside of the house is being painted. We chose a mocha color. I finally just gave into the sea of beige trend. Everyone apparently likes beige.

Anyway.. I'm becoming increasingly nervous. Because the color they were putting on was clearly pretty pink to me. My friend had already called to report it looked "peechy" in color.

I thought they were all insane. The color was going to dry much more brown. I was sure of it.

Until about an hour ago. By then, all my people had convinced me the color was never going to be brown. The house was clearly pink. I'm starting to become anxious - because this is the first place I didn't do a million paint swatches to see if the color was going to look good.

So I begin to try and figure out how I'm going to make this color work. I just can't see it happening.

Finally I asked the painters. Is this pink or mocha?

It's then they said the most wonderful words in flipping history. "Primer".

Personally - I've never seen pink primer... but I'm super relieved. The neighbors at the crapshack are probably all having a heart attack though.


  1. I didn't know about pink primer, but you can get ceiling paint that's pink when it goes on (so you can tell whether you've covered the old paint, then dries white. (There's spackle that works like that, too.)

    I avoid white ceiling paint; as Christopher Lowell says, it looks like you stapled a handkerchief to the ceiling. I usually follow his idea of using the lightest shade from the same color strip (you know, the ones with six or seven colors) that the wall paint came from. Most people don't notice it's not till you tell them, but the effect is to make the ceiling look higher.

  2. Yeah - I've used the spackle. It's oddly playdoh-ish. So - I like it.

    I think after today I'm liking the pink primer. You certainly can't miss where you painted it.