If you are as cheap, I mean frugal, as I am, you will understand what I mean when I say I’ve invented a new color to paint the goat barns. Usually I keep up a continuous scavenging, I mean informed shopping, at the different hardware, lumber, and any store that carries and mixes paints, to look for their great deals on clearances. These clearance paints are more commonly known as “Ooops” paints and paints that are older than the store. People accidentally and sometimes on purpose mix paints together to get not what they want for their homes and these end up on the clearance shelf for as low as $5 a gallon. So, absolutely premium paints that are old and you take your chance, or the colors are a bit different than what people usually will buy, all for $5 or $6 a gallon. Considering that premium paints run from $26 a gallon on up, this clearance stuff is a great deal, if you aren’t too picky about the colors.

The last couple of years I have been neglectful on my duties of scavenging paints, er, smart shopping on paints, because of all the chores on the farm, so my paint supplies had dwindled. This weekend I suddenly realized that the big sliding doors on either end of the big barn, and the feed room section and it’s door were all leaking badly. What I mean by leaking is that when it rained, the doors were getting soaked through and through because the paint was just about gone.

I hurried to our basement where I store all my wonderful buys on paints and lo and behold, I was down to a few gallons. I had one gallon of Guess What I Am color, no one had put a splash of color on the lid like they usually do at paint stores when they mix the color. So, I didn’t know what color that was. I had half a gallon of dark brown. It was so old that the can was rusting and not only the lid came off when pried on, but a half inch of the rusted top of the can came with it. Oddly enough the paint was still nice and liquid on the inside. See what I mean about buying premium paint? And, I had a can of supposedly dark dark brown paint that I couldn’t get the lid off no matter how much I pried.

When Lee went to work the next day, I sent him on a mission, to drop by a couple of the hardware stores and lumber stores and see what they had on clearance. It needed to be latex to mix with what I had on hand. That’s another thing to remember. You don’t want to be mixing enamel paint with latex. It just doesn’t work out that well. So, mix latex with latex and enamel with enamel and you’ll do fine.

The next evening he came back with a couple of gallons of paint that were sort of browns. Perfect. I waited for a nice sunny day and started mixing my paints all together in a big bucket. The Guess What I Am gallon ended up being a light gray. Good enough. It got thrown into the big bucket along with the half gallon of brown out of the rusted can. One of the sort of browns that Lee had brought home had a hue of bright red running through it. Odd. Wonder what they had wanted to paint with that one. Now, you are probably wondering where I got this grand idea of clearance paints and combining paints, other than me being a tight wad, I mean frugally minded.

I have been a great admirer of an old farmer up in northern Ohio. All of his barns and buildings faced the road and the back side faced a big hill. It wasn’t for years did I realize that he only painted the sides of the buildings that faced the road where people could see them. Thus, saving tons of money on paint.

Since I couldn’t save money that way, I went with clearance paints and mixing them together. That way I saved money in my own way. Now, when I mixed the gray paint with the reddish brown paint, with the creamy brown paint, and the dark brown paint, Voila! A totally new and interesting color. Chocolate Plum was born.

Our big barn is made of unpainted oak boards but those plywood sliding doors absolutely needed paint to last as good as those old oak boards. Now my Chocolate Plum color will help those sliding doors last almost as long as the barn’s oak boards. There’s nothing like being a frugal goat farmer with a gift for inventing colors and a love of those clearance tables.