Faron, Thank you so much for writing back right away. You are so knowledgeable and generous with your time. I just want my walls to look nice and I was afraid if I skipped the primer, the paint may not stick. These forums (especially Michael) has taught me how important it is to prep the walls before painting and I can see how nice my other walls look by following this advice and making sure my painter did what I told him to do. But my bathroom was just painted and I am not changing the color much at all. I guess it is my fault for taking a shower too soon in the room and not putting the fan on in the room after each shower since I have no windows and that is why the paint is now streaking. All the other rooms look great and the other bathrooms have no problems that are rarely used. I do have the guest bathroom that I can take showers in for one week. I rarely use it since I like taking showers in my master bathroom with the glass doors than in a tub with a shower curtain. I only use that bathroom for guests or to wash my little doggies. I guess for one week, I can use the guest bathroom to shower in despite a little smell from my doggie's puppy pads in there. I guess I should feel blessed that my townhouse has 2 1/2 baths and has a lot of room. I just keep the puppy pads in there since in the winter time my spoiled little 5.8 lb Maltese, Sassy does not like to go outside. My other little doggies will go outside in my fenced in backyard on the stones but not the little Miss Princess Sassy who has always been like this knowing her cuteness will win out. I am just changing the color slightly since the BM Navajo White is only slightly less yellow than the Deep Cream and the Navajo White which I feel will go better with the bone colored Jacuzzi and the two bone colored sinks and the bone colored toilet, as well as the taupe tiles up the sides of the Jacuzzi and shower stall. The extra gray in the Navajo White surprisingly does not look gray to me in that room but warms the walls up and takes away the lemon cast that to me just did not look right against the taupe tiles. They are so similar in color and the formulas show it (Navajo White has 4 Less Units of Oxide Yellow and 4 more units of Gray and 1/2 extra unit of Orange than the deep cream color but otherwise they are so much alike in formula) but the room will then appear less lemon but still happy and bright and be semi-gloss like I wanted since I have no windows in it and I want to be able to clean it easily when I brush my teeth and get my walls dirty. I love my new pictures and my new olive towels and new olive rug and I feel they will go better with walls that do not have that lemon cast to them. I guess I should ask the paint store for a "liquid deglosser" and they will know what I mean? I can degloss part of the bathroom except for the tallest walls I will not be able to reach even with a tall ladder since I am not quite 5 feet. Maybe I can do what I can before painter arrives and he can do the rest. I think he is not that tall either (but much taller than me) but has tall ladders and long poles for his rollers. I had the painter tint the primer deep cream last time for the deep cream room and bone white tinted for the bone white room. I guess that was not really necessary since the colors are so light. The painter used the Deep Cream tinted primer for the Philadelphia Painted room telling me it was not worth going out to buy new primer. I wonder if this is why that room turned out more yellow than I had thought it would be.

Within a few years, many more paint companies' colorants will be "Proprietary". (In way, they are all proprietary now, because every co. has slightly different versions/colors of their colorants) I've been at an ACE for almost a decade now. We don't have BM by choice. We've got C2 for our high-end line and haven't looked back! Like BMs' upper lines, C2 has more than 12 colorants available to match colors from other lines (16 available). So yes....it's much easier to match INTO a paintline that uses more colorants. Going the OTHER direction RARELY works, and is usually optically impossible. A color made with 6 or 7 colorants (some that are high-strength too...) is technically impossible to match into a company that only has 10 or 11 colorants. Example: By store policy, we don't match C2 colors into ACE. There's a reason for that! Faron

Hi everyone. Here's another, current thread where we're discussing formulas. Read this thread too. Bottomline is there is more than one way to custom match and/or mix a color and still meet the industry standard for a "match". In my experience, formulas for Color To Go jugs (and all small fresh-mixed samples) notoriously differ from the formula for a gallon. It has to do with quantities, volume of base in the can, how much room there is for colorant, how small the colorant load has to be divided in order to "fit" into smaller containers, how small a quantity can the dispenser actually shoot, etc. Overall, most people are fine with the quality of the "match" produced by differing formulas. Most of the time, they can't tell. Now, that's either because it truly is not discernable or they just don't know any better and don't look closely enough to compare in order to find fault with the quality of the color match. For testing - and to keep things as simple and accurate as possible - the rule of thumb is if you want the color you see on the original paint chip, you need to buy at least a quart in the brand, paint grade, and sheen you ultimately want to use. Wonder if she has a formula that she could share that would get us close to BM White Dove. If I wanted a proper BenM White Dove, I'd go to whatever lengths necessary to buy it from Benjamin Moore. I often order my Ben Moore paint from myperfectcolor.com and have it shipped. It's fabulously convenient. :) I've said it a million times on the forums here, getting wrapped around color formulas and paint bases is a rat hole no one should go down. Cutting formulas, doubling formulas, trying to decipher color characteristics by reading the colorants in the formula and/or the tint of the paint base -- if anyone tells you there is anything worthwhile in dissecting and studying any of that, they're full of beans. Because there is nothing about any of it that we, who are on the consumer side of the paint counter, can manage or control. Blogosphere is plastered with posts from people professing their success cutting formulas, reading the formulas to ascertain "undertones" and whatnot. Their success doing so can be attributed to nothing more than luck. Luck and they've already made up their mind that their color mixing gymnastics will yield a successful color before they even start. Unless your daily job is mixing paint colors, analyzing color in its liquid state is of no value. Dry and cured color is the only thing that matters because it's all we consumers can control and manage. So, the question about all the various versions of White Dove is how do they look? And the most important thing would be to choose a version and make sure it's used consistently throughout a project.

Draw-down card. Most professional real-deal paint stores have pre-printed draw-down cards. Usually with their store name and logo,blanks for misc information, etc. If they don't, they should. Or at the very least they have *something* prepared for use as a draw-down card. For every single gallon of paint for every single one of my clients, I make the store personnel make a draw-down card and tape it to the actual can. Every single gallon. A draw-down card is typically the size of an index card. It's not just a dot on the lid or lable. They have to brush out the card. They often will use a disposable shop cloth to swipe the color from the can on to the card. Just once is enough to get a read on if the gallon was mixed to match the chip. If there is any question about the match, we do a second coat on the draw-down card, dry it and take a look - usually outside. If it doesn't match to the point I say it's a match, the can is reworked, remixed or I don't buy it. The truth is there are some paint colors that simply do not cross brands successfully. Despite effort upon effort, it just doesn't work. Many of the factors influencing quality of a *color match* have already been pointed out. And there is no industry standard that officially qualifies what is a match and what is not. So, it's up to you. You're kinda on your own. Just remember you're the customer and you walked into the paint store to get what you want - not what they want to give you.