House paint...

My wife loves to look through the color chips so I can't always be as frugal with paint as I like. If it was up to me our entire hose would be painted with the $5 mixing mistakes from our local paint store. While my wife is always seeking the perfect color I just don't care that much. A bit of serendipity makes me happy and if a color is not quite right it doesn't bother me. It's paint. It's job is to cover the drywall.

When I was a wild and free single college student I worked for the most cheap ass rat bastard contractor ever. Most of his work was student slums. He also owned some buildings. I will never forgive him for the time he made me tell a house full of young women that they wouldn't have hot water for the weekend because he was too cheap to pay a plumber for after hours service and too drunk to purchase and install a water heater himself. He might have asked me to do it, but the local housing authorities had their eyes on him and had threatened his contractor's license. On modern internet consumer sites, his rating would have been "DON'T LET THIS GUY TOUCH YOUR HOME!!!" But most of the people who own student housing are just as cheap as this guy was and they liked him.

For student housing we used five gallon buckets of "off-white" nominally semi-gloss paint. Actually it was more "eggshell" but it was good for everything, kitchen, bath, or bedroom. The base pigment was more white clay than titanium dioxide. It really didn't matter how durable the paint was because in student housing it was always more about covering up the messes the departing students had left as quickly as you could before the new students moved in. We used a lot of Kilz too, covering up all sorts of stains I didn't want to think much about, like "is that, um, blood or pizza sauce?" You really don't want to know. Don't ask, don't tell.

For more discerning clients my boss offered "blush," yellow/orange, green, blue, and mud colored paints. He mixed these himself, continuously adding mis-colored, leftover, and remnant acrylic/latex paints he picked up from a variety of sources.

His six paint tubs were like the stews they served in some European monasteries -- a big pot always cooking to which new ingredients were added as the stew was drawn off.

My own method of painting is a little bit more sophisticated. First, I always buy fairly high quality paints, with the same or similar water-based vinyl-acrylic-latex formulations. For projects my wife takes a shining too, there is no choice, she will pick the "perfect color" and buy a few gallons of it. We sometimes get fancy too, with rag-roll and two or three color texture painting.

Of course there is always paint left over, since paint by the gallon costs a lot less than paint by the quart. That's when I get frugal. I'll save a quart of original colors for future patching and repairs, and the rest goes into the mixes, same as my boss used to do. This also keeps our garage from filling up with half empty cans of rotting paint that will never be used.

Paints that have not been used for a long time end up as "mud" color and used to paint over the graffiti on our back wall. We live near a high school on a well traveled foot path and graffiti is just a fact of life in our community. Painting it over quickly discourages future "artists." They'll move on to places their works will last.