Colour co-ordinating

Day 12 Saturday 21st August 2010

Earth Red

So now it's time to do some work on the interior, namely painting over the awful textured wallpaper found in every house in this land.
Even the ceilings are wallpapered here.
Probably to cover up some second rate plastering.
Off we go to our favourite home centre.
As usual, things aren't quite what you might have expected.
I'm used to looking at colour charts that have millions of shades of hundreds of colours.
You just pick the one you want and the man mixes it up for you, right? Wrong.
Here nobody has heard of colour charts.
Everything is premixed and you have the choice of 3 shades of white, Black, beige, 2 kinds of grey, blue, red and green and one shade of orange.
14 colours. That’s it.
 

Artist at work

OK then....Let’s get Ash White. It’s white with a hint of grey.
We're going to need a big bucket of it to do the whole house.
So I check what sizes are on the shelf
you can buy 0.2 of a litre, 0.5L, 3L, 7L and the big daddy, 14 litres. Who the hell came up with these random sizes?? If someone in NZ tried to market a 7 litre pot of paint, you'd think that someone at the paint factory had fucked up.
Anyhoo, let’s just get the 14L in Ash white.
Oh, can’t see it in the big size..."Shizuka. Go tell that dude we want ash white in a 14L tin"
 

Answer....Ash white is not so popular so we only sell it in the smaller tins....3L is the biggest we have.
By now, I should have known.
In the end we got 14 litres of milky white.
It’s white with a hint of.....white.