The Ultimate Shade

Newsletter 2024-05-31

I hate painting. That shouldn’t be a surprise. I loathe all forms of home maintenance, but among the pantheon of awful tasks, painting is the worst. There’s so much collateral damage. No article of clothing or nearby inanimate object can survive unscathed. I can’t even eat spaghetti without causing a considerable splash zone. Put a paint brush in my hands and the blast radius is practically nuclear. It’s the only chore that comes with its own wardrobe. Everyone on earth has painting clothes, damaged garments they hate and would otherwise throw away or burn but can’t because they have to keep them on hand in case they need to slap a fresh layer of pigment on something. The whole of the human race has to maintain a stockpile of tattered but wearable rags simply because painting exists. I also hate painting because it’s finishing work, which is not where I excel. Stick me with demolition, which is impossible to screw up. Any damage I cause in that step will actually get me closer to my goal. Finishing work is the opposite of that. I should never be left to put the final touches on something. I’ll inevitably put a big streak of paint where it doesn’t belong and turn a project that was almost perfect into an abject eyesore. Every paint store in America should take out a restraining order against me. I shouldn't be allowed within a country mile of a brush. Unfortunately, painting my front columns was the only way to get my father-in-law, Bob, to return. If I wanted him to finish my porch, I had to do some prep work first. As I’ve proven time and time again, “some” is far more than I can handle.

The biggest problem with painting, in addition to all the other problems, each of which is also the biggest, is that it has so many prerequisites. It’s not just the special dress code. I have to tape off edges, lay down paint cloths, and find brushes that haven’t hardened into steel since I was last arrogant enough to try (and fail) to paint. That’s three more steps than my preferred number, which is zero. The most important painting supply is, unexpectedly, the paint. It has to match. That’s something my wife Lola cares about deeply. The front porch, as the name suggests, is at the front of our house. She wants it to look good. So do I. The difference is I remember that most people will see it from twenty feet away driving down the road at thirty miles an hour. There’s a fine line between “good” and “good enough.” Lola wanted our columns to precisely match the white vinyl railings we planned to use. To my male eye, all shades of white are the same. Any mention of hues beyond that is nothing but paint industry propaganda. There are only six colors in existence, plus white and black. If it’s not on the rainbow, it’s a lie. Lola disagrees. Thanks to the superior number of cones in her female eyes, she can see a wider variety of the light spectrum than I can. She wanted the precise type of white that would match the plastic we were adding to our house. I immediately folded and accepted her standards. This wasn’t my hill to die on. I plan to die in a ditch like the fortune teller said.

The website for the vinyl railings listed the exact brand and mixture of paint to use for a perfect match. Of course, it was only sold at a particular high-end paint store chain in another suburb. I made the trip, then waited in a surprisingly long line. These days, paint stores are more popular than roller coasters. Finally, I talked to the guy at the counter. I pulled up the website and showed him exactly what I needed. He checked his computer and said the product no longer existed. The white base paint had been discontinued and replaced by a nearly identical white base paint. His computer couldn’t figure out how to convert the ingredient ratios from the first white paint to the second white paint, so it simply gave up. The paint store could not sell me white paint. Technology is amazing. The transaction only failed because the guy was such a bad salesman. He could have offered me literally any random gallon of white paint and I would have gone home completely satisfied. I never would have known the difference, and neither would Lola. If it looked slightly off, she would have blamed my inferior painting techniques or the natural state of our house, which manages to add a layer of dust to everything, both inside and out. Instead, I left empty handed. The silver lining was that my pre-existing hate for painting was reaffirmed. I love being right.

The only way forward was to color match the railings, which I didn’t have yet. I placed the order. They wouldn’t arrive for a month. Not that I minded the delay. The best procrastination is the kind that’s out of my control. Please ignore that I could have ordered the railings a month earlier and my painting wouldn’t have been delayed at all. Near the end of May, I got confirmation that the railings were in the local store. I was just waiting for someone to deliver them from there to my house. I went to the store and asked for an employee to pull out a piece so I could take it to the paint desk. They obliged, although I’m not sure if it was actually from my boxes or just a random one they had in stock. In hindsight, I could have had them color match any random piece of vinyl railing and it would have worked, but that wouldn’t have let me sit around for a month. Anything worth doing is worth stretching out. I think I know where my kids get it from. With the plastic in hand, I approached the paint counter in the hardware store. It was time for me to make my biggest mistake of the entire renovation.