Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Another busy day for us...

Another busy day for us...  Yesterday, that is.  We spent the morning at a local paint store, where their color expert helped us select paint colors for our new home.  If it were up to me, I'd just pick some nice off-white color and paint the whole house with it :)  Debbie had other ideas – and we ended up with a total of ten different colors, and I have to admit that I like both the selections and the variety.  Most of them are shades of browns and blue-greens, mostly quite light.  A couple of rooms will be a fairly bright creamy yellow color.  The door casings, baseboards, and crown moldings will be bright white. 

The process of choosing the colors was entirely new to me.  We visited the store late last week, and they told us to come back with samples of our flooring and pictures of rooms we like the looks of (gleaned from the web).  Yesterday we did that, and looked dozens of paint sample chips against both the flooring samples and the photos we'd collected.  The fluorescent store lighting threw off my perception of the colors; I had to keep taking them to a sunlit doorway to see what they really looked like (often quite different than under fluorescent lighting, which there will be none of in our home, as I absolutely detest it).  To my surprise, Debbie and I converged on each color choice fairly quickly.

We had a lovely evening, going out to dinner with the couple who were our realtors for our new home purchase, and who are becoming good friends.  They live just a few miles south of us, outside the town of Avon.  Last night they took us to a restaurant we'd never been to before: the Copper Mill, in downtown Logan.  Debbie had grilled salmon and asparagus, which she pronounced as excellent (hard for her to say about someone else's grilled salmon, as it's one of her specialties).  I had a concoction they call “Burbank”: chicken breast, ham, smoked bacon, tomato, avocado, and mozzarella drizzled with hollandaise sauce – it will make your brains fall out.  Both of us had mango lemonade to drink, served with lemon quarters floating in it – delicious!  A meal like that, with the good company of our friends, was a real treat.

Today we have two contractors coming out.  One will be doing some plumbing work: fixing a drainage issue in the basement, and installing a new water softener.  The other will be fixing some major problems with our spring development (our home's water comes from a spring).  It's been neglected for many years, is falling apart, and is seriously ugly with a “concentration camp” style barbed-wire topped fence surrounding it (more a problem for our neighbor than for us, but we're embarrassed by it).  We're having it fixed up and made into something we hope better disappears into the background.

3 comments:

  1. Now that our betters have decreed that we must replace our incandescent bulbs, I think it is going to get harder to pick paints and other household colors. The spectrum from the replacements (like LEDs) is enough different that things like laundry whiteners don't work the same. I expect that paints and wallpapers optimized for incandescent light will be the same. You probably should try to check your samples under the kinds of bulbs you will be using. Me, I'm just going to paint everything white.

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  2. :)

    We're putting in a mixture of LEDs and halogen (mostly relatively small). The better LED lights are actually getting pretty darned good. When you look at a spectrograph of their output, it's not a few spikes like you see with fluorescent, or, for that matter, the cheaper or older LEDs. Instead, it's a set of overlapping bumps - not quite the smooth curve you'd get from sunlight or incandescent lamps, but not actually too bad an approximation. I'm very sensitive to the color distortions, and I find these better LEDs to be at least acceptable. In those places where I'd really like to have sunlight (higher color temperature), they're actually better than even the best halogens...

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  3. The visible spectrum of the LEDs seems to be pretty good compared to fluorescents, but apparently they don't have much UV. That may be a problem with some surfaces and coatings. This is the article I was remembering: http://news.psu.edu/story/312538/2014/04/18/research/under-some-led-bulbs-whites-arent-whiter-white

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