Friday, July 3, 2009

We continue the quest...

I'm sure I've mentioned before that my dad was a contractor. He always used Pittsburgh Paints, and the painter that he worked with when he was a crew foreman and who he would hire for larger jobs when he was independent also always used PP. (Just an aside-- this particular painter was a great friend to my dad and a great guy; strangely, he died of some form of liver cancer almost 2 years to the day after my father also died of liver/bile duct cancer. Strange world...)

When we bought the house, my mother told me she'd had great luck with the guys at our PP dealer, saying, "They always worked with me to get the right color."

I'm not sure what I thought she meant by that, but clearly I wasn't paying attention.

I went on a paint swatch gathering extravaganza this morning on my day off, and found a swatch I like at Sherwin-Williams (btw, ALL paints are 30% off today, tomorrow and Sunday!!) and one from PP. I decided to try the one from PP first. When the much older gentleman working asked me what I was painting, I told him what's going on, that this is just a sample.

"Well, if you put the color up there and you don't like it, don't throw it away! Bring it back. We'll keep adjusting it until you like it and then we can set down a formula for larger quantities." And he said 5 gallons would run in the range of $100; I've prepared myself for a cool $250/5gal, so this is great news.

Normally I'd be skeptical of this procedure. However, these are guys who have been doing this a loooong time and are probably good at both computer-matching and hand-matching. The main selling point here is that they cater primarily to contractors and interior decorators; these are people who have clients to please. And they're not trying to sell me gallon after gallon of colors that aren't right. My mother (an artist, btw) continues to tell me that they know what they're doing.

I haven't put the sample up yet-- there's hamburgers and brats to grill, after all-- but I thought this was a practice worth mentioning, something I would imagine many of the more "professionally" oriented places practice. Our Kelly Moore and Benjamin Moore dealers seem to have similar clients, so it wouldn't surprise me if they did the same thing...

We'll see how this turns out. Do any of you have paint guys who do this for you? What's been your success? And for those of you using SW, don't forget it's 30% off this weekend if you have projects on the horizon...

3 comments:

Stephanie said...

I have three different paint stores here in Portland who provide a similar level of service (but not a such a great price!) I trust them completely (and avoid the other paint stores because they simply don't measure up.)

Happy 4th and happy painting!

PlantingOaks said...

The person at HomeDepot said they could do this for us, but it did not work at all. At All. Not only did it not go the direction we needed, but it went from being a neutral beige we might have been able to us in another room to being a strange mustardy color.

Though our grandmother took a shining to it, an honestly, it doesn't look bad where she put it.

Amalie said...

Luckily, I think we're happy with the formula that we started with, so I won't have to find out if it works!

I also don't trust the big box stores to do this; while some of them happen to have people who know what they're doing, they hire seasonal labor and over all have too much employee turnover to fully know what they're doing. I get the impression that the guys at PP are lifers-- this is a career and a skill.