A tip o’ the hat to Sherwin-Williams

I don’t often endorse commercial products or companies, but I have to offer a hat-tip to Sherwin-Williams for their amazingly useful Web tools, and the excellence of the service in two of their stores that I’ve visited recently.

As you know, my home was damaged in a fire last week, and amongst other things, the interior will be completely repainted to remove the smell of smoke from the walls. I checked out half-a-dozen paint companies’ Web sites, but found the Sherwin-Williams Color Visualizer by far the most intuitive and useful tool on the Web. It allows you to apply any of their paint colors to walls and other elements, to visualize how it will look in your home. Sure, their pre-designed “scenes” are far too nice to compare to my own low-cost cottage-type environment, but they worked well enough to give me a pretty good idea of what I wanted.

Having done that, you can print out the visualizations you’ve created, along with a coupon good for a 15% discount on Sherwin-Williams paints. I took the printout into my nearest S-W store, in Pineville, LA, and bought a couple of sample quarts (low-cost, too!) of the colors I’d selected, to paint squares on my walls and see how they looked in real life, rather than in a computer simulation. The salesperson was extremely helpful, and came up with a couple of really good ideas for accent colors to complement the overall design. He was a young man, but not sloppily dressed or over-casual, as too many of them are nowadays: he was cleanly dressed, professional in his manner, and obviously knew his stuff very well indeed. Color me impressed!

Here are some screenshots from the Color Visualizer of the color schemes I plan to use in my home. I wanted a warm, cosy effect, and I think that with the help of the Visualizer I’ve got close to what I want. I’ll refine it from this point onward by testing actual paint on the walls. The furniture and accessories in the Visualizer are nicer than mine, as I said, but the paint colors are reasonably accurate. Click any picture for a larger view.

For those interested, the living-room, kitchen and bathroom walls are in a color called Daybreak (Sherwin-Williams code number 6700); the ceiling’s in Extra White (7006); the living-room furniture’s in an orange-brown called Armagnac (6354); and the bedroom walls are in Jonquil (6674). I’ll do the trim and baseboards in Extra White and Armagnac respectively, or I may pick another suitable color with the useful advice of that young man at the Sherwin-Williams store. Readers, please feel free to contribute your own suggestions in Comments.

All in all, a very satisfying experience as a consumer. Thanks, Sherwin-Williams, and you may be sure I’ll be recommending your Web tools and customer service to all and sundry!

Peter