Vanquishing the Banana Pudding

When we moved in the first order of business was repainting the first floor. The color needed to be gone,…yesterday.  It was a soft yellow color, which in theory is pretty.  I don’t think that the previous owners tested the color in several lights before going with it.  When the lights were low, it was kind of pleasant.  With the sun shining in it was hard to describe.  “Wow, that’s intense!”  was a common response to walking in our front door. This was hardly the reaction that we wanted.  We later were able to put our finger on it, it was like living inside of a bowl of Banana Pudding.   

Original Listing Picture of the Livingroom

Listing Picture of the Kitchen

On one of my very frustrating trips to the very unhelpful paint section at my local large hardware chain store, I picked up several little color pots in various shades of blues for the main floor.  More fun ensued. I took them to the self check out, turned my wrist so I could scan the bar code on one of the color pots, and splat.  The person who had mixed the paint had not screwed the lid on after checking the color.  Mirror Pond blue paint all over the self check out kiosk, and my hand. Again, learning curve?  Though this one felt much less like my fault.  None the less, noted: never take a paint can without making sure that the lid is tight.  Better their expensive piece of equipment than my car upholstery though!  

Over the next few weeks we went through about 7-8 colors.  Each trip to a new paint store brought hope, maybe this time we’ll find it.  I couldn’t take the yellow much longer.  At this point we had about 7 – 3 foot color swatches painted on our walls in various spots to try different lights.  The Banana Pudding looked like it was molding.  We were getting desperate.  In a last ditch effort, we stopped at the Ace Hardware near our house, and there our sanity was returned to us.  They had staff that not only knew what they were talking about, but genuinely cared.  They were awesome!! We found our color, which I strongly had my doubts about.  Patrick picked out something that looked akin to Chocolate Chip Mint Ice Cream.  It ended up being the perfect shade.  Admittedly in some lights it can be a bit intense, and it pictures it looks a bit like my favorite Crayola Crayon from first grade, Jungle Green.  We LOVE Mint Julep, a Clark and Kensington Color.  It can also be mixed in their store brand color.  The nice thing about this color is that it really complimented the satin nickel fixtures that they had installed.  The yellow paint really clashed with it.

In the following months I was there at least 2-3 times a week.  I learned the most important painting lesson I could: good materials make all the difference.  I am cheap, for a lack of a better word, but after trying lots of paints, I have to say that Benjamin Moore is totally worth it.  Even the lower or mid grade level paints in their lines are much better than most any other one’s you’ll get.  Clark and Kensington was really good. Ace stopped carrying Benjamin Moore though, and they were closing it out, so I picked out the colors that I would need for the my next few projects at a great price. Unfortunately that also means that I won’t be able to drive 5 minutes to get BM colors. I feel it is worth mentioning that I recommend Tree Frog paint over the 3M, even though it’s much more expensive.  The hours of touch ups with a fine brush that we had to do after doing all of the Mint Julep paint was not worth the extra $4 it would have cost me in higher quality tape.