Color matching pain(t)

Yesterday I unmounted my TV and Sonos Playbar from the family room wall. Between the holes from that mount, miscellaneous damage from a different mount I tried, and various oopsies from the previous owner I had a plethora of holes to patch on the wall.

No problem. Whack on some spackle, sand smooth, and paint, right?

Well, the paint that was out in the shed had gone off and separated enough to be useless. But there was the drips on the side that seemed to match up with the paint on the walls. Off the the paint store and they matched the color of the paint on the side of the old can perfectly.

Come home and paint the now smooth wall.

Fail.

It was distinctly a shade greener than what was actually on the wall. It was rather disastrous looking. (I wish I took a picture but I was too pissed to be thinking clearly)

So... now I have a quart of paint that was useless on the wall I was trying to fix and I still needed to match the paint color because I didn't want to paint the entire room.

This is when I learned something.

I picked a part of the wall that wasn't too noticeable on the wall I was messing with and went to town with a utility knife. I just cut off a paint chip from the wall that was maybe a square inch or so and maybe 1/8" thick. I sent Ennie off to the store with it and I patched the gauge I just made on the wall along with the still useless paint they mixed me an hour or two before.

Praise be to the local Sherwin Williams store.

They nailed it perfectly when they had a sample of the actual paint on the wall.

And this is the lesson I learned. If you're looking to patch a wall, don't even bother with paint chips that you gather from the store or anything like that. You're already going to be painting on the wall as is, any mistakes are going to show up anyway. Patching is simple and you're already doing it elsewhere. Just make another hole in the wall and take the wall to the store. Anything else you're doing will likely be a fail.

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Reason n+1 for leaving Seattle