We have been working on a wonderful house in North Leeds for just over six months. Some of our projects speed past, and some, like this one, take a more leisurely pace, allowing the scheme to evolve in it’s own time. At the moment we are working on the second tranche of work; the decorating.
To date the decorating has had some exciting moments; firstly, the wall-covering (imported from Europe) was delivered in the wrong colour way. Not so much a problem, it was delivered in plenty of time for the colour to be spotted, reported and the new wall-covering to arrive before the decorators started. On Monday we called in to see how the decorating was going, and spotted something else: The paint colour on the walls wasn’t exactly what we were expecting… Now paint is a funny thing. Colour is a funny thing. But paint is a very funny thing.
Paint changes colour dramatically depending on where it is, well, painted. The same colour can look different in different rooms of the same house, or even on different walls in the same room. Shadow and light, the other furnishings and flooring, the way the room faces, the ceiling heights etc etc all play a massive part in how your eye perceives the colour. And we all know from that dress that different eyes see the same colour differently too.
So when I get asked (frequently) to recommend a colour for someone’s walls, the answer is often: I can’t. At SGH we narrow it down to a short list, of what theoretically will look good. And then we get really big sample pots, and paint them on the wall. Two coats. And then we wait. And wait a bit longer. And then we decide what works. (NB Angela Beaumont the colour specialist gave us this advice, and without it, there would have been many costly mistakes!).
So when we arrived at the sitting room in Roundhay it wasn’t as straight forward as saying, ‘umm, that’s the wrong colour on the walls’. We took a tin back to the office, got out our sample pot, our brush out board and the paint chip cards. And then compared.
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And then it was pretty obvious that our suspicions were correct. The wrong paint had not only been supplied, it had been painted on the walls! Eek. Now a quick call to the supplier ensured that the right paint was quickly dispatched, and within 48 hours everything was as it should be.
So the room did look like this (before we did anything!).
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And now it looks like this – still lots to do, but this project feels like it’s coming together nicely.
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Happy, sunny Friday!
SGHx
