painting and progress in fits and starts.

and unsolicited advice on choosing paint colors.

This is a post that I would typically paywall, because paid subscriptions are what keep me writing here. Today, I decided that rather than add a paywall, I’d offer a celebratory 20% off annual subscriptions instead. If you want regular access to posts like these and access to the full comments section, I hope you’ll consider taking this opportunity to upgrade.

We’ve been painting the main rooms of our apartment white for weeks now. Brushes are perpetually wrapped in plastic bread bags and stuck into the door of the refrigerator. There’s an entire paint roller wedged next to the carton of eggs on the bottom shelf. When there’s an hour to spare, we reopen a globbed-up can of paint, pull out the paint tray, and paint what we can before life inevitably intervenes.

The impact of a fresh coat of paint in an apartment can’t really be overstated and neither can the time it takes to get it there. When we moved in, the entire apartment was painted in the matte yellowish white preferred by landlords hoping to disguise damaged walls. The plastic eyes of drywall anchors glared at us from perplexing vantage points on every wall. I immediately took pliers to the anchors and patched the holes they left behind and then for three whole months after that the slightly shiny sheen of my Fast n’ Final repairs caught my eye each time I turned my head. Soon, my children’s greasy fingerprints joined them, glinting menacingly in the afternoon sun. When one of my kids palmed the center of the living room wall after scarfing a fistful of oily popcorn, leaving a perfect handprint precisely in the spot where we project movies, I started looking into washable finishes and scrutinizing nearly imperceptible differences in shades of white.

Our goal was to finish painting the main rooms of our apartment before the heat went on, but we’ve already passed that mark, so we’re trying to steal small mid-day painting opportunities when the radiators aren’t blasting and we can still fling the windows open. One living room wall has been exactly one-quarter painted for two weeks now.

I painted our last apartment in the fall of 2020 while listening to NPR report on whether or not we’d officially ousted an authoritarian president. On that impossibly sunny November day when the news finally broke that we had, I left my fridge full of paint brushes and danced in the streets. I didn’t imagine that five Novembers later, I’d be slowly painting a different apartment, with that same despot back in office, but also with a different and more potent kind of hope burbling all around me. This week, in New York and across the country, joy wasn’t born from deposing a despot, but from ushering in a political future that challenges the tired and inequitable structures that allowed an authoritarian to return to office in the first place. It’s political progress and potential built by the people, grounded in who and what we’re fighting for, not in who we’re fighting against. It feels so good that I might just find the energy to pick up a paintbrush again.

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Typically free subscribers would hit a paywall right about here. Today, instead, I’m offering 20% off annual subscriptions. That comes out to $3 and change a month, or, roughly $.60 per otherwise paywalled post. If you want regular access to the full scope of things I’m writing here, now’s a great time to upgrade!

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We do not need another internet roundup of the best shades of white paint. There are enough posts on the subject to last us a lifetime and most of them simply regurgitate the inscrutable descriptions offered by the paint companies themselves. A classic go-to white that elicits images of fresh cotton and pure silk. I’m sorry, what? Are we talking cotton bolls or cotton balls, people? Ginned cotton? Carded cotton? Bleached and processed cotton? Mulberry silk or Eri silk? Please hold, I can’t remember the difference between the two anyway. I’m sorry to be pedantic but I just have so many questions.

These made-for-SEO posts can be helpful for narrowing down the alarmingly vast number of choices and for getting a cursory sense of what might work in your home. They’ll definitely give you a sense of what colors other people like. But even if one color has been heartily recommended to you over and over I do unfortunately think drawing a comparison between a few different shades is actually useful. I’ve learned that for me it’s not enough to, as I did in our last apartment, paint swatches of a single shade of white. Presented with this scenario, I will invariably step back, shrug my shoulders, and with absolutely nothing to go against except that anything is better than this say, OKAY!

This time around, I decided to buy a few different sample pots and after starting out by timidly painting swatches on paper that I could move around the room, I threw caution to the wind and painted directly on the wall—on many walls—using up every last drop of sample paint. I’m now a paint sample evangelist and can’t help but suggest you do the same. At the end of your sampling let your pots be empty because you have swatched so enthusiastically. Swatch in the shadows, swatch in the light, and live with your multi-toned walls for a week or four! Watch the way the light interacts with each them. Ask everyone who steps into your home to weigh in! Disregard their opinions and go with your gut! You’re painting your particular home for your particular self and just about no one’s photographs on the world wide web are going to tell you how a room feels when you’re in it, let alone what the color of the paint would look like anywhere else. (To no one’s surprise, I unhumbly recommend actual paint samples and not the silly vinyl sticky things that cost more, don’t always reflect the actual paint color, and need to be moved all around the place.)

For this apartment, I bought sample pots of Benjamin Moore’s Simply White, Chantilly Lace, and White Dove. (All Benjamin Moore because it’s what’s available within walking distance and because I was already getting decision paralysis and really didn’t need more noise added to the situation.) Chantilly Lace, which was very ardently recommended by many friends, both real and imagined, felt too stark and too blue. A bunch of reviews also indicated that it didn’t cover well and I do not need to be out here painting extra coats of paint. Simply White, which I loved in a past apartment, felt nearly as yellow as the existing color in this one, while White Dove, which we ultimately chose, felt fresh and warm without going golden.

So far, half-painted walls and all, I think we made a good choice. I can’t possibly say that the same would be true for any of you and that’s the whole point. Mostly, there’s really no comparison between a freshly painted wall and hole-filled one with multiple finishes and color seepage from who knows what other colors used to be there. But also, there’s comparison to seeing a color on your actual walls before making a choice.

For ease and for cost, we decided to use the same shade of white for walls and for trim and most barely controversially, we decided to use the same finish as well. Neither trim nor walls in this apartment have been treated kindly and so rather than try to create an imaginary line between the spot where the trim ends and the bumpy wall begins, we painted it all the same. I have no regrets. Conventional wisdom is that matte paint will hide some of a wall’s imperfections, of which there are many, but it also bounces less light and is typically difficult to wash. I opted for more light bouncing and less handwringing over handprints. As extra security I also decided to use Benjamin Moore’s Scuff X line of paint, which claims to be easy to wash and hard to scuff. I found it to be slightly more smelly in terms of VOCs than other Benjamin Moore paint I’ve used, but otherwise it’s been very nice to work with (and dear lord it covers better than Farrow & Ball by a mile and a half). The fact of the matter is that homes need repainting more often than I—or landlords—would care to admit. Just peep the wall next to a child’s bed if you need a reminder. And then start swatching.

PS. Before I bought my samples, I did a search of Facebook Marketplace and Buy Nothing Groups to see if I could save myself the cost and take paint off someone else’s hands. I didn’t have any luck this time, but I found a few listings so it might be worth a search if you’re in the market.