Introducing: Laughing + Energetic Orange

When I was sorting through all the swag I collected at the Buffalo Home + Garden Show, a coupon for Sherwin-Williams dropped to the floor. Because S-W products have generally been priced higher than the comparable brands at Home Depot + Lowe’s, I’ve pretty much taken to overlooking them when it came to buying mass amounts of wall paint.

But blatant sales incentives generally change that for me. (Sidenote: Anyone else looking forward to TLC’s new series on Extreme Couponing?) This particular coupon had a $10 off $50 purchase, and, more excitingly, a buy-one-get-one-free offer for the Color To Go product. Initially assuming this meant that they were like the little (itsy-bitsy-tiny) samples sold at the big box stores (commonly 8 oz. for $3), I was surprised to see that the product at S-W was 29.5 oz. (That equates to 1.84 pints, .92 pint, or .23 gallon) priced just over $5. Do a little coupon finagling and home show swagging, and you’ll get 2 for that price.

Was this good to be true? Maybe. The employee at the store explained to me that the samples lacked the same bonding agents that traditional paint contains, meaning that it wouldn’t hold up to wear and tear and S-W strongly discouraged users from treating it like a real coat of paint. Regardless of that warning, I wanted to try it to test it out, so I picked some color chips.

Two colors I’ve been thinking of introducing more of are tomato-soup red and yellow-orange. See the check marks on the lowermost left and the uppermost right? Meet Laughing Orange and Energetic Orange, the winners of my little trial. The second box down on the right is Cayenne, which was a close third choice.

I’ve been wanting to insert a little more of these colors since:

1. I bought (matching) stools at a garage sale last summer (for $1, no lie). They haven’t been repainted yet, but I loved the color they already were – sort of like tomato soup:

2. I bought some new art for my mantle (which conveniently has both laughing orange + energetic orange tones in it):

And so, with those inspirations I made my choices and purchased (again, the lower left and upper right in that paint chip photo further up on the page). Seriously. All this paint, just $5.

And… zoom in a little bit on the specs so you can see for yourself the exact kind I bought – interior/exterior acrylic, 29.5 oz., satin.

I’m not planning on painting anything that receives heavy wear-and-tear (like dresser drawers or a shelf), but I’m going to start with some old picture frames and see how it holds up. More to come. Let’s see if I can disprove the paint advisor at S-W and make good use of this cheap paint.