Paint worries me. I used to hate the smell but it is much worse now that I have read the side of the (tempted to write ‘tin’ but alas, no more) plastic tub. Even low Volatile Organic Compound paints are contributing to atmospheric pollution, if only by a small degree. Wanting to keep this house’s footprint as small as possible leads me to not want to repeat past paint policy in the Archer household.
It was embarrassing taking so many assorted paint pots to my lovely friend Fiona’s shed – not that she minded as she has been very tolerant of our much extended moving. It’s no accident that to dispose of any paint we need to wait for a Hazardous Waste Disposal Day at our local tip (sorry – Recycling Centre), and paint being the price it is, it fits with both of our aims to use up as much paint as is possible, saving money and saving producing more of a ‘hazardous’ substance.
But what if both the big trade buckets of paint happen to be magnolia? I moved into a brand new house in 1972, with every single wall painted magnolia. If it ever had any charm it wore off as quickly as any love for blackcurrants, when my mum took over an allotment full of them.
One of the buckets smelt very off and had separated out into very runny at the top with floating dried bits of paint in it, and lumpy and hard underneath. I did consider straining it through our plastic sieve that is definitely nearing the end of its useful life in the kitchen, but even my frugality could not summon up any enthusiasm for this. Amazingly Hazardous Waste day in King’s Lynn is next Saturday so out it goes.
The other bucket was looking better but could not compensate for the fact that it wasn’t the white I wanted. Surely masonry paint would work?
We have a whole white pot of that. A bit of googling told me that this one was low VOC so why did it say I shouldn’t use it on interior walls? Fungicide and a whole load of other nasties that we shouldn’t be breathing in. It is free to any good home but it is the Wilko brand. Dating and chronology being my thing, it definitely pre-dates 2023 when Wilkinson stores closed but neither of us can remember ever using white masonry paint at number 75. I last remember using it in about 1998 on my first house in Lynn and Rob also used it before marriage to me. I am not going to unpack the many lessons I ought to learn from this but I will start the mental moral debate about where this paint is going next Saturday.
So one magnolia paint bucket later but no way is magnolia going to be the colour of our new sitting room. But why am I painting anyway when there are dozens of the 81 boxes still to unpack? The title of this post was going to be ‘Overwhelm’. Anything we want to achieve has about 6 things we need to do before in order to achieve it. Many of the boxes are books. Books have a preeminence in our house – even if I had to vacuum off layers of dust before packing some of them up. They are old friends that just have to be with us – and we have no shelves for them. Rob has ordered the wood but we (I) need to paint the walls first. Our prenuptial agreement that a black and white photograper cannot have the final say over the colour of the walls, means that the decorating has been largely my department.
This post is dragging out a bit and a cup of sleepy tea beckons. Paint 2 – the Sequel will be posted soon but will it contain the solution to the Great Magnolia Dilemma?
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