Painting, Continued

During the last seven years we have received a thorough indoctrination in the following beliefs:

1. Graffiti artists aren't the only vandals who work with paint.
2. Any painter worth hiring charges more than you care to pay.
3. No other sort of painter will prepare surfaces as carefully as the owner will.
4. The pain of hiring such a painter is less than the pain of seeing paint peel in two or three years.

The practical corollaries have been that

1. We will paint anything we can reach, from at most a ten foot ladder or by hanging out a window.
2. We will wince and write a check for rake boards, the dormer, and the reachable but depressing porch rails.

These beliefs may be true primarily of the United States. The best painter we know, an immigrant trained in Europe, says that Americans don't want to pay for good painting. The brochures from the Fine Paints of Holland line imply the same; they discuss the apprenticeship that Dutch painters undergo, and speak of the decent income a qualified painter makes in the Netherlands.

Thick White Paint

K. is able to get a great deal of disgust into the words "that thick white paint", sometimes "that ugly thick white paint." This paint is used by crews such as realtors or their clients hire to hide years of neglect, sometimes damage. The more careless crews leave it spotted on floors. Nearly all seem to seal windows shut, or reinforce paint seals already in place. They blur the detail of trim as a blizzard hides low shrubs.

That thick white paint cost me twenty minutes or half an hour this weekend, when I had to lower an upper window sash that was painted into place probably seven years ago. A  little work with a sharp putty knife freed the sash from the parting strip, but but the parting strip itself stuck to the frame here and there. Well, parting bead is cheap at the lumber yard, and I wasn't gentle with it.

I'm happy to say that our surface of thick white paint must be down to a very few square feet. 

Whites

Today I needed to paint a couple of small windows, in Benjamin Moore Atrium White like all our trim. Because I made searched from right to left and the quart can was at the left of the lineup, I made a fair survey of our paint holdings, at least those in standard Benjamin Moore trade dress. To summarize, we have a lot of white paint. Our holdings are largest in Cameo White, Decorator's White, and White Dove, amounting between them to five or six gallon cans. There is a gallon can of Corinthian White, and a quart can of Polar Ice, which I suppose must be a white. A couple of gallon cans of Moore's "Aura" line are probably White Dove.

Certainly I reached 20 without imagining that there was more than one thing called "white paint". I've learned better since.