A beautiful creamy white paint color — custom from Behr

I spent much of August helping weebit gather stuff for her law school apartment. Her style is not all-vintage, hunt-forever-til-it’s-perfect like mine. There’s a mix of old and new: contemporary-traditional, industrial, vintage finds, and stuff from Mom and Dad’s house. Because weebit wanted to be done by the time school started, once our “hunting for bargains” time ran out we finished with cheery filler-inner pieces that were easy to acquire and didn’t break the bank from the likes of Ikea, Home Goods, Pier One and Target. Indeed: The apartment is done, save for a few walls that need art, which she will pick up in her travels. She is now ensconced, very happy with the outcome, (and as you read this, wrestling Contracts, Civil Procedures and Torts). 

Since I spent mega-hours working on this project, I want to share out various “winner” ideas that surfaced. First up is one thing that we didn’t even have to think about: The paint color on the walls. We really liked it. It’s a vanilla creamy off-white custom color, from Behr. And I have the formula: 

Can anyone translate these colors?

Here you go, although I don’t think the paint on the walls was flat matte, I think they pulled this gallon for some touch ups and specified the wrong finish. Get yee a nice eggshell finish.

Unretouched photo taken later in the day, lights off, sun no longer coming in the window. 

Retouched — I upped the exposure. Early morning. Late August sun dappling in via the bay windows, from the East. 

It’s very difficult to photograph paint colors, because they shift with light, and well, I was using my iphone. But trust me: This is a good color. It has just enough yellow in it to make it a bit sunny, yet not so much yellow that the walls start bouncing off each other intensifying. I am not trained to read paint labels to deconstruct their formulas, nor can I dissect, on sight, what colors are in a paint. But I’d guess there’s also a little red (pink) in this color too… a bit of peachiness. Yes: Off-white peachy yellow, does that make sense? I need to give it a name. I pecked around a bit. It may be like  BM Vanilla Ice Cream — the egg into the cream would add the orange, the vanilla would add a bit of brown/bronze/gold. Behr also has a vanilla ice cream, and while it’s a quite pleasing color, especially on that small bungalow, I think it’s even yellower than what weebit has on her walls.

This is a “glowy” color. It seems to have good light reflectivity, so on a sunny day, you don’t really need the overhead lights. At night, turn on a few 40-watt lamps and you are happy. Glowy. 

Weebit is a millenial who has been acculturated to prefer gray walls. But she now has personal experience, with me standing over her to remind her: Off-whites are fabulous. She likes her walls a lot.

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