Good gloomy GEORGIA morning to anyone still musing on the ridiculous lengths someone will go to to find just the right paint color! A shout-out to ttodd, amysrq, patricianat,, kitchendetective, and postano for All your help & understaning Lo these many years. Do you realize it’s been just a smidge over Ten years since I was boring people with my insane search for the “one right color” (Ha!) for my entryway? And the Dry Sage stayed for the next few years though every other room got a makeover until we sold that house in late 2012! We bought a new house and had to choose a color from the builders very limited palette though the light taupe we picked looked really nice. Then, 3 years into that new life in a nearby California city I cracked and painted all the open living spaces Gray Owl by Ben Moore. (Except For Benjamin Moore Titanium that went up on the master bedroom walls the first day we moved in) Then we sold and moved to Georgia. Yes. North Georgia. Very chilly winters. I didn’t even own enough socks! (My listing photo of Ca house two Yrs ago in Gray Owl) im not here on Houzz a lot because this Georgia house is small and I’ve made most of the changes I’m going to...Still deciding on a color to paint the mismatched kitchen cabinets...Revere Pewter may be the winner. Yes. I am still psycho about color sampling as 9 different paint shades ranging from the expected (BM White Dove) to the moody (BM Hale Navy) to the reigning Grays (BM Kendall Charcoal, Chelsea Gray, and aforementioned Revere Pewter) have been painted on my 3 test cabinet doors that live in my garage. BM Dark Olive is wonderful if I went with the tuxedo kitchen look using White Dove for the uppers, but it’s hard to pull off that style when your kitchen is the size of the interior of a Honda Odyssey. I cant help but wonder what each of you has been up to? Still painting and rearranging furniture or moved on to the more grownup concerns of life in this changing world? Have you moved onto Instagram or simply saying no to Home magazines and internet Influencers in favor of...what? Love to know. Red

I love Ben Moore. I painted a bathroom with Pratt and Lambert and found it thin compared to the texture of Ben Moore. To me, you could load more Ben Moore paint on a roller without making a mess. I have a den, hall and kitchen that was painted 9 years ago with Benjamin Moore. I have twins girls that aren't friendly to the walls. But the den looks clean and great. I always use the eggshell - so that helps for cleanability. In my bathroom, seven years ago, I used the Pratt and Lambert. It started dinging about five years ago. It didn't hold up near as well, in my opinion. If I was going to do a big project, Benjamin Moore is the way I'd go. Labor is the biggest part of painting. I'd spend $20 extra on a gallon of paint if it meant I'd get another couple of years out of it. Something I notice on the Benjamin Moore paint and I don't know if it is the case with all paints, is the color looks different in every light with in the same room. I've heard it is the sign of a good paint, but... My brother came into our new house and pointed at two walls in the entry way asking if they were painted the same color. They were. This phenomena can cause problems with matching fabrics, tiles, etc.

wryorwhite -- Don't be scared by all this talk of yellowing. It's exaggerated. Bear in mind that oil-based paint was essentially all that was used in American homes through the 1980s -- so unless you're a teenager, you were around when any house you'd walk into (including the one in which you grew up) had its walls painted with oil-based paint. Trust yourself and your own experience...do you ever remember walking into a house and thinking to yourself "My, these walls are awfully yellowed!"? I sure don't. When's the last time you've heard someone say "Oh, look at those walls! They've gone from looking like snow to looking like Big Bird! This is certainly oil-based paint!"? Never. Yes, oil-based paint yellows very slighly with time. So do all oil-based products, including the clear polyurethane with which wood floors are most often finished. This "yellowing" effect is minimal, and it's not something that jumps out at you or is offensive or anything like that. You have to actively look for it, and the only people who do that are (a) homosexuals, and (b) people who work in the marketing departments of latex-based paint companies. The drawbacks of latex-based paint have largely been resolved in the past few years. The latex-based paints of 2008 are a far cry from the ones of 20 years ago. This is especially true with the high-quality brands like Pratt & Lambert. Modern high-end latex pains bond to drywall well, hold up to moisture and cleaning well, etc. However - latex-based paints aren't as good as oil-based paints when it comes to moisture and dirt resistance, standing up to scrubbing, and bonding to wood. They never can be, because oil (unlike latex) naturally resists water, and naturally soaks into wood (rather than just sitting on top like a skin). Think of what happens when you mix oil and water -- they don't mix; instead, they just separate and keep apart. So moisture and dirt don't bond to the oil-based paint, so it's very easy to clean without damage. In addition, oil-based paint soaks into wood -- unlike latex-based paint, which forms into a skin that you can peel off. This is one of the big drawbacks of using latex paint on high-traffic wood items (like kitchen cabinets). My house has latex-based paint on the walls and ceilings, and oil-based paint on all the wood trim (including the doors and windows and cabinets) -- this is a time-tested and popular arrangement, and it has held up very well for me and my neighbors. Speaking of polyurethane -- there are two types, oil-based and water-based (latex-based) - same as paint. ALL of the manufacturers -- Minwax, Cabot, etc. -- recommend strongly in favor of using the oil-based polyurethane on floors. It's tougher, it holds up better to traffic and moisture, and this "yellowing" effect that the self-proclaimed experts yammer on about are so minimal as to be non-existent. The same is true with the oil-based vs. water-based (latex-based) paints. Again, trust yourself and your own experiences -- how many times have you walked into a home and thought to yourself that the painted walls and ceilings, or the wood floors, were yellowed?

I contact P&L about this, and here was their response: "Thank you for contacting Pratt & Lambert. Sherwin-Williams is our parent company. However, their paints and our paints are not exact formulations. There are similarities between certain paints of theirs and our paint products, but they certainly are not exactly alike. " So apparently there is some difference. I responded asking if the formulations had changed since the SW take-over (as older P&L reviews were generally quite good). I will post back the response (if I get one).