Was chatting with my contractor the other day about all of the different kinds of crappy paint I have collected over the years, and he made an offhand comment that when he worked at a particular school each summer they would take all of the paint cans donated by parents over the year and box them all, and that would be the new color of the hallways.
It occurred to me that when we think of institutional hues in paint, those colors could easily have come from mixing together whatever was left in the paint closet.
So, for those who have painted big ugly walls in institutions, was the paint chosen to be that color or was it the luck of the draw?
After white, Magnolia is one of the most common colours for bulk contractor paints. Magnolia is pretty ‘blah’, but then again, it goes with almost anything, and hides the dirt a little better than white.
I seem to remember a Dirty Jobs episode where Mike was at a recycling center. They were taking partial cans of paint with similar hues and mixing them into larger cans. These were being packaged and sent to third world locations to paint schools and the like.
I’m a painting contractor and have painted acres of large walls in various institutions (including schools) over the years. I’ve never heard of this before. Paint is quite cheap compared to the cost of labor and the work involved to get a uniform sheen and color, enough to paint the hallways in a school, would be considerable.
Not that it couldn’t be done, mind you, if the school was low on funds. I’ve boxed up leftover paint I’ve had on hand (I have a mudroom full of leftover paint, mistints and tester quarts) to save money for a customer who wants to, say, paint a rental house and wasn’t fussy on color.
But a contractor can buy perfectly good zero-VOC commercial/builder-grade paint for about $16.00 per gallon. VOCs would be a concern, especially in a school.
When I was a child we lived in army houses. The army painted the inside every few years and the colour was always dark green and cream. My mother used to persuade them to mix the two to give a lighter shade of green.
Wow, that’s why I love the Dope. Ask a question about almost anything and you can have people who really know the answer reply.
Sometimes the signal-to-noise ratio can get pretty bad, but this thread is spot on.