If you haven't painted recently, Sherwin-Williams' Duration paint is really excellent stuff. If you haven't painted recently, you may not know that it costs a fortune and they don't sell it in sizes smaller than a gallon.

For our recent spate of painting, I picked up all the paint I thought I would need while it was on sale during the month of February. Unfortunately, we failed to take two things into account. The color we have been using needed either a tinted primer or three coats of paint (which took us a while to figure out) and we have 11 1/2 foot ceilings. On Saturday I had to go back for a third gallon of paint. Saturday as I was putting a second coat of paint on the three walls of the dining room we were painting before moving all the furniture and painting the fourth wall, I began to worry. I could tell we had almost enough paint, but it was going to be close.

On Sunday afternoon, Justin put primer and a first coat of paint on the final wall. We still had a little bit of paint left, but it looked to be definitely not enough. After church on Sunday evening, we put the kids to bed, hauled out the painting paraphenalia again and while Justin painted, I scraped out every last bit of paint from all three gallons with a spatula. We "found" just barely enough paint, but it is done. I may still go buy more so that we can have paint for touch up spots, as the need arises, but the primary painting in our downstairs is done. I cannot begin to say how great that feels.