WHAT'S HAPPENING IN THE GARDEN

I got a message from a friend and blog reader the other day who asked, "How come you aren't blogging about planting?"

It's a fair question, this being primarily a gardening blog. The fact of the matter is that it's still really cool here and there is very little to plant. I did sow a few very small areas of peas, lettuce and argula a couple weeks ago and there's pretty much nothing to report on those.

But there are other, somewhat random things happening in the garden that I don't feel are worth a post, but maybe worth a little update.

I took my first trip to a nursery over the weekend. The whole world is out shopping at nurseries because of course Mother's Day is this weekend and people equate Mother's Day with the time to plant. That couldn't be further from the case here, but old habits die hard. I think the nurseries here push annuals and hanging baskets for Mother's Day in part because they know things will be set back by the cold and people will buy more later. Our last frost date isn't until May 10, so it's way too early to be thinking about planting annuals here.

That said, I, of course, bought a handful of annuals, because I just couldn't resist and I suffer from plant-related FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). So I grab things when I see them and nurse them along in the greenhouse until it's time to plant, usually around Memorial Day.

A lot of people have asked about my greenhouse. Here's an affiliate link to it. I really love it, but it's important to keep in mind that this is a temporary structure. The plastic cover ripped quickly last year and the company sent me a replacement, but the same thing happened again this year. It's a tiny tear on a seam that I easily fixed with tape, but I think it's worth mentioning.

Oxalis 'Molten Lava'

I'd been to neither of the two nurseries I visited on Sunday, which is rather alarming as I thought I'd been to every nursery in a 50-mile radius. The first was not great, but unbeknownst to me they were holding a sale with very small, single plant hanging baskets for $5 each. There was a cop directing traffic into the parking lot! It was really no way to experience a nursery for the first time. Mostly it was just chaos.

The second nursery was amazing and I eagerly signed up for their frequent buyer program because I have a feeling I'll be going back many times. Even my husband knew about this place and it was completely unknown to me. I'm so disappointed in myself. They were still waiting for a lot of deliveries but they had a huge, clean, well organized annuals greenhouse with exceptionally well cared for plants that were not overpriced. I picked up three Oxalis 'Molten Lava', which is not new, but new to me. I love its mounding habit and orange to lime foliage.

Speaking of the greenhouse, it's starting to fill up and I'm happy to report that everything seems to be doing well despite the cool weather. The exception is the sweet peas which are looking a little anemic and I think they desperately need some feeding.

That is only about half of the dahlias. The tubers that haven't sprouted yet are still in the house. Where in the world am I going to put them all?

I worked on the garden to the north of the house this weekend for a long time and looking out the upstairs window it looks like I've made very little progress. I did, however, repaint the obelisk we built several years ago. I finally found a spray paint line with better color selection: Montana Gold. Granted, it's about twice the price of a regular can of spray paint (about $8), but the colors are worth it and the coverage is great. The old apple green faded and I gave it new life in a bright turquoise.

The new color is a bright turquoise.

The old apple green was great too.

I think this year I'll grow some climbing nasturtiums up it for some additional color. I removed the goji berries from this raised bed because they got too big and their big, thorny canes, were reaching out and grabbing me. I'll find another spot for them, but for now they are living in very large nursery containers.

That's the report from here. I've been gardening until dark, setting a goal of filling a tub trug with weeds after dinner every night that it's not raining. I'm so happy that the sun doesn't set until about 8 these days.

What's up in your garden?

ALMOST PERFECT + SPRAY PAINT = LIGHT LOVE

There are times when you wonder what someone was thinking when they decided to make something one way or the other. I now believe that this is exactly why spray paint was invented.

I ordered this pretty light for the office / back room (heretofore just called the office even though there's really not that much work that happens back there, but this slash thing is getting annoying). Yes, the ceilings are low (well, 8 feet, which I guess is normal, but it's normal low, not normal high) and I've since read 40,000 designer blog posts about how I really should have a flush mount light there, but I didn't want a flush mount light. I wanted a pretty pendant light to be a fun dash of pizazz in the room.

Pretty light but bad canopy and chain color.

Lighting is one of those things where you can spent $10 or $1,000 and in the end you still have something that illuminates your room. It's just that the $10 looks like a boob and the $1,000 is a work of art. Most of us choose lights that fall somewhere in between. In this case, I was closer to $10 than $1,000 but still at a level I was somewhat uncomfortable spending for a light, even after finding a pretty good coupon. But when that light arrived I was smitten. Until I pulled the canopy and chain out of the box. Because while the light is scalloped-shaped bits of heaven (OK, capiz shells) finely lined in 14-karat gold (not 14-karat gold), the chain and canopy were spray painted a hideous shade of orange that I think was supposed to replicate copper but didn't in any way, shape or form replicate copper or any other actual metal.

There was also a pressing design issue with the chain: There was no way to shorten it. We tried to cut open a link, remove the excess links and close it back up again, but there was no way that sucker was going to go back together. Since by this point I realized that we were going to have to repaint the chain and canopy, we picked up a stainless steel openable chain link that twists shut and used that to make the connection where we had cut off the chain.

My mini spray booth setup and the canopy and chain in all its orange coppery glory.

The cutest can of spray paint ever.

And after a few coats of spray paint.

I scuffed up the canopy with a little bit of sandpaper, cleaned it well, rigged up a mini spray booth in the box the light was shipped in and went to town with a very cute mini can of gold spray paint.

Three coats later and all was forgiven.

The now-improved light looking great.

You can see the twist-close link we added to the top and the spiffy new gold color that matches the rest of the light perfectly.

Yes, it irritates me that you can pay not a little bit of money for a light and still have to fix it yourself, but I love it so much that I would have ordered it anyway even if I knew that ahead of time. I've come a long way. Years ago I would have sent that light back because if something was new it was supposed to be perfect. These days, I just get out the spray paint.

Here are some other random things I've spray painted over the years.

• Hinges
• Speakers
• Barn light
• Patio chairs
• Desk 
• Lamp shade
• Patio table
• Obelisk

So what about you: Are you willing to make modifications to something new but not perfect?

GARDENING LIKE IT'S GOING TO RAIN

Quick giveaway notes: The winner of the Perfect Garden Hose is Linnae! Congratulations, Linnae. Check your email. The rest of the giveaways are still open. The next to close is the giveaway of the A.M. Leonard Deluxe Soil Knife. 

There is efficient gardening and then there is the kind of gardening you do when a rainstorm is predicted that night. The latter kind of gardening is bound to leave with sore muscles where you didn't know you had muscles, very dirty and utterly spent.

I gave the patio chairs a new blue hue. I wish it was more navy, but you take what you can get when it comes to spray paint. They were dry by the time the rain came that night.

That's the kind of gardening I did Sunday. I also had a few painting projects started on Saturday—spraying the patio chairs and painting the cellar doors—to finish up. Among the day's gardening accomplishments:

• I planted two small hornbeams that I picked up on a bit of lark (and to test whether they really are deer resistant before I invest in more). Hornbeams will pleach (grow together), so ideally some day they will form a bit of a raised gateway to the vegetable gardening area.
• I planted 15 or so bareroot irises along the little creek. I'm hoping they will love this spot and take over an area that is otherwise nothing great to look at.
• Stuck an equal number of small trillium bulbs in the shade garden (which needs tons of work; lots of plant labels acting as tombstones this year).
• Dug out all of the Russian sage (Perovski atriplicifolia) and the drumstick alliums (Allium sphaerocephalon) out of the skinny patio garden and moved them to the other side of the house. Also rescued a healthy clematis (I think it's 'Mrs. N. Thompson'), hopefully rescued another (maybe 'Westerplatte') and declared a pathetic little tangutica not worth the effort. 
• Potted up some of the ostrich ferns (Matteuccia struthiopteris) that are in the way of path in the woods to sell at our master gardener plant sale at the end of the month. 
• Dug out much of the "soil" in the skinny patio bed that has been giving me so much trouble and replaced with with bagged garden soil, top soil, compost and manure.

It might not be much to look at right now, but the new skinny patio bed is all cleaned up, soil heavily amended/replaced and mulched until it is planted later this month. The only thing I didn't move was a daffodil that's been there forever. It's the very first thing to bloom in the entire yard every year and I just felt like it deserved to keep its spot.

That last one was the real killer, but getting in there and really digging down offered some answers as to why nothing has been thriving there. About 6 inches down it is entirely sand. Over the years the soil in that bed has been mounded up as I added compost and mulch on top of it, but since it was planted I was never able to incorporate that in. Since it's already a little drier area because of the small eaves on the house, very little moisture was getting to plants, even though I watered somewhat frequently. When I dug up the Russian sage and the clematis, they all came up bareroot—no root ball at all. 

I mixed the whole thing up, along with the remaining sand, to a depth of at least 18 inches if not more. Because I don't expect to plant here until the end of the month, I also covered it up with a thin layer of pine bark fines mulch and it is now a lovely blank canvas. Or it was until the dog walked through it Monday monring.

I still have to do a small area on the other side of the cellar door, but that was quite enough for yesterday.

Back to waiting for rain though. Because we were supposed to get a rather impressive storm, the only thing I watered all day was the two hornbeam trees. Everything else—the bare root irises, trillium bulbs, alliums and transplanted Russian sage—was left to wait for the deluge. Skipping the watering step when planting something is a rarity but doing so allows you to fly through so many other tasks so it's a great coup when you can get Mother Nature to do the work for you.

We didn't get as much rain as I had expected Sunday night, but more is predicted this week. I gave everything a dose of water but I'm hoping Mother Nature gives everything a nice, big drink.

A MOST LOVELY GARDEN SURPRISE

Rarely do I have occasion to see my neighbors' yards in daylight these days. On weekdays most dog walks happen at dusk or later and on weekends we head to the beach whenever possible. So it was a most pleasant surprise when I spotted something surprising in a neighbor's yard when stiff winter winds forced us to walk on the road this weekend.

I'm not sure I would have even spotted this gem had I not glanced in the direction one of the dogs was detouring toward, but it caught the corner of my eye.

Do you see it?

How about now?

It's a small tree that has been spray-painted acid green (the same color, I think, as my obelisk). I don't know anything about this tree, whether it's dead or alive (I can't think spray paint is good for a living tree, but I'll keep a close eye on it in spring), or who meticulously painted every bit of it.

It's not in a particularly important part of their yard, which was massively re-landscaped a few years ago, but that's what I love about it. It's a little surprise in an area that would be otherwise overlooked.

I love it so much that I'm going to keep an eye out for a dead little tree in our woods that I could do the same thing to.

 What do think about spray-painting trees? Love it or leave it?

Coming in for a landing: one big ol' obelisk

Normally I am not one to rush through projects. I really believe in the adage that anything worth doing is worth doing well. But I recently threw that aside and just went for it on a little building project for the garden.

I got a couple of goji berry vines recently and I am so excited for them. Not just because I'm anxious to try goji berries (which are hailed as the new antioxidant superfood) because they are said to be delicious, but also because the photos I've seen of the plants are gorgeous.

When I read that they can grow to 10 feet tall, I knew I'd need a sturdy structure to support them and I'm always looking for fun garden structures. Have you priced sturdy garden structures lately? Egads, they are pricy. And when I started looking at wooden obelisks (also search for tuteurs, as the two words seem to be used interchangeably) on the Internet I realized that they didn't look too complicated.

So that's how I ended up building an obelisk/tuteur in half an afternoon. Let me preface this by saying that unless you are a very proficient woodworker, this should take you much longer than it took me. But the fact of the matter is that this is the craziest time of year. Work is nuts, the garden demands more time than I can fathom (I would be in good shape if I could take a week off of work and garden 14 hours every one of those days, so dividing that up into nights and weekends equals a lot of days) and, as you know, I have more than a few other summer hobbies I like to do. And, as usual, there is an underlying pressure to get it all done so I can hurry up and enjoy summer.

I found this great tutorial for building an obelisk. The directions aren't lengthy, but they aren't hard to figure out. So here's where I tell you to FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS. Because I didn't. Even though they were there, plain as day, spelled out in English and everything. But oh no ... I had to improvise. Do not improvise on this project.

You'll notice that this great blogger was extremely precise about how to cut the wood. In many cases it involves cutting with a bevel and an angle (the bevel is tipping your saw blade one direction and the angle is sliding the cutting surface to a certain degree), flipping the wood over and then cutting again. But we have a lousy saw and no table extension for it, so it is really hard to cut long pieces of wood without a second person helping to hold them. I actually put one leg up on the wall to support the end of the wood to make some of the cuts. And I did not wear eye protection. It is a wonder that I still have 10 fingers and two eyes. So don't do that. Please. I don't have enough readers to start losing them to eye and finger injuries.

Anyway, I ended up flipping the boards any which way was easier to cut, which meant I totally screwed up the cuts, but I didn't realize it until it came time to put the frames together.

Yep, not supposed to look like that.

If I had been in "Anything worth doing is worth doing well" mode, I would have stopped, bought more wood and started over, actually following the directions. But I was in "Dammit, this has to get done today" mode. So I just screwed it together as best I could. You can see that it wasn't right. These should be laying nice and flat and square.

You definitely need a second person when it comes to assembling the whole thing and even then it's a bit of challenge. We found it to be helpful to attach the bottom frame (the biggest one) first and then attach the top piece. The rest of the frames didn't exactly land where they were supposed to according to the measurements, but they look pretty well spaced to me. For the frames that were completely out of whack because of my miscuts, I literally jumped on them a few times to flatten them out and then we bent them when we were screwing them on the legs to make them sort of level. 

Ok, this all sounds like super shoddy work, and I'll admit that it mostly was. But honestly, this isn't one of those things that is meant to be appreciated up close and hopefully it will be covered in plants before too long. Also, wood doesn't tend to last too long in the garden so it's not like this a permanent structure. Do I sound like I'm justifying my less-than-stellar workmanship? Yeah, I am.

Anyway, we got the whole thing together and honestly I didn't think it looked too bad. I had a really hard time figuring out what color to paint it though. I wanted to stick with spray paint because, again, this was about fast, and spray paint is so much faster than a brush. That meant I was limited to spray paint colors (you can of course, seek out special spray paint at Michael's or even have spray paint matched to any paint color through www.myperfectcolor.com, but those are expensive options). I would have loved a light orange, but the oranges I were finding were a bit hunter orange for my taste. I actually bought a lovely teal and then returned it. In the end I settled on Key Lime green which turned out to be neon green. Of course I spray-primed it first, but I didn't bother sanding it or filling any screw holes or anything.

Also, did I mention that this is a BIG obelisk? And it looks even bigger when I stuck it in a raised bed. Mr. Much More Patient has mentioned that we may need to put a light on top of it to warn passing aircraft. There is a chance he is exaggerating. 

In any case, yes it's big. But hopefully it will soon be covered in lush green leaves and not be so imposing. Time will tell. 

Two sure signs of spring

A happy Friday to you all!

There is indeed reason to be joyous this Friday. The painters were to come this morning to finish up a few last touch ups on the cabinets which means that I will spend a good part of the weekend organizing what I can while we wait for drawer fronts and cabinet doors. I can't tell you how nice it will be to reduce the number of boxes spread throughout the house. When we bought the house I was in a hurry to get unpacked because Mr. Much More Patient left for about four months the day after we moved in and I just wanted things put away, so I sort of threw things in drawers and they stayed there for 11 years. Now I have the luxury of thinking things through a bit more.

The even better news is that yesterday I came across two sure signs of spring.

Those are daffodils, folks. But not just daffodils poking up. Those are BUDS! Sure it's only one small clump that is always the earliest to show its face, but who cares. There is life out there.

The other sign of spring was this.

The first spray painting project of the year! I'm not sure what is up with me and painting things black on the spur-of-the-moment but it has happened again. I've been thinking that I needed to pull a little black over to the other side of the kitchen to balance out the botanical prints and the door. The light was down for painting and the outside temperature was 52 degrees, a whopping two degrees above the minimum temperature for spray painting.

Of course I'll show you more on that later, but for now, let's all revel in two signs of spring as reliable as a robin searching for a worm.

A temporary, but pretty, tabletop

Here are a few things I've learned in the last week:

1. Living near a large, damn near freezing lake (seriously the water temperature off our house is 56 degrees today), has its benefits when it's amazing hot outside (but it's still plenty hot).
2. Detroit is not a good place to get stuck overnight whilst flying (in hindsight, I should have foregone the airline-provided hotel and just stayed in the airport. It was much nicer).
3. I am officially the worst blogger of before-and-afters ever. In my defense, however, that's because I'm so anxious to get going on a project that I forget to take a picture of the before.

That brings me to a little project I pulled off a week or two ago with not a lot of effort. Normally I'd just skip telling you about it giving the lack of before and during pictures, but it actually turned out pretty neat so I'm going to do it anyway. Plus, it's nothing hard it doesn't require a lot of explanation.

Three or so year ago we bought a patio set that included a tiled table. Because we're a little light on storage space, we've been leaving it out all winter, usually covered by a tarp. Apparently that's not so good for a tile-topped table because the tiles started popping off a couple years ago. We just glued them back on but then they'd pop off again. This year the table just started disintegrating to the point where we could pull the tiles off by hand.

I really didn't feel like looking for a new patio set in the beginning of summer (when selection is not at its best and prices are are their highest), nor was that in this year's budget, so we needed to come up with an interim solution. We first tried to take all the tiles off and hopefully just sand the top, but the top was made up of some kind of plasticlike material that couldn't be messed with.

Instead, we bought a half sheet of plywood and had it cut in half to the 48-inch width of the original table. Mr. Much More Patient took the jigsaw to it to get it back into a circular shape and then sanded the edges to round them a bit. We used birch plywood, but they were all pretty much the same price and I think anything would have worked for this purpose.

With the shape defined, the finishing department (that would be me) took over. I sanded the entire thing, both sides with 120-grit then 220-grit sandpaper and primed both sides. This was another spray-paint only project for me (mostly to save time, but also some money because I certainly didn't need an entire quart of paint for this project). The idea with priming the underside of the table was to give it a bit more protection from the elements. I used a spray primer by BIN, which is my preferred brand.

We then attached it to the table base, mostly because Mr. Much More Patient was leaving for a couple weeks and I wanted him to do it before he left. It could have been done at any time in the process after the bottom was primed.

With it attached to the table base I no longer had to rely on the crappy plastic sawbucks, which as you can see in the picture below, fell over with the top on them (the good sawbucks are in continued use with the front screen door, which, if you can believe, I painted backwards about two months ago and is still sitting in the basement waiting to be finished).

Honestly, this is the first part in the process that it occurred to me that I should take some pictures, and I did it mostly to send to my husband to prove that the sawbucks were garbage.

I did about four or five coats of white spray paint on the entire top. I really wanted to coat it well given that the table top could use all the protection it could get. Then I taped off some stripes quickly (and if you look closely you can see they weren't exactly straight, but the priority here was getting a functioning table back) and gave it a full can's worth of spraying with Rustoleum's Stone Gray.

I waited the required 48 hours (that's the thing with spray paint ... you either have to recoat it within an hour or so or wait until it's completely dry in about two days) and then covered in a clear protective spray. Again, my intention is to protect it from the elements as best I could.

When that dried it was a little rough, so I did a very fine wet sanding (where you literally get the sandpaper good and wet) with 1500-grit sandpaper (which I assume we have around for various boat-related projects) just to get it nice and smooth without taking off much of the clear lacquer.

I actually like the new look of the table much more than the old look. I know it won't last very long and I have to wipe it off a lot because the white shows every speck of dirt, but it serves it's purpose beautifully. All told we probably spent about $40 on this (if you divide the cost of the plywood since we still have half a sheet for another project), which is much less than a new table would have cost. I'm not sure if we'll get more than this summer out of it, but we'll certainly enjoy it plenty this year.

More spray paint magic: This time on hinges

Having successfully spray painted a handful of odd things including a lamp (including the shade) and our wall-mounted stereo speakers, I'm far more inclined to at least give spray paint a chance to improve a situation before buying something new. And once again, spray paint has come through!

As I've said from the beginning, it was crucial to keep the office renovation on a shoestring budget. There are some great deals to be found on cabinet hardware (the handles I got from Ikea were incredibly well priced, I thought) but hinges are a whole other thing. And there are 32 hinges on the small wall of cabinets in my office. Even if, by some miracle, I found hinges for $2 each, I'd already be at $64. No way, José.

All that shiny brass hardware HAD to go!

I had nothing to lose by trying to spray paint them. And thankfully, after all that pain of staining the counters and painting the cabinets, this was an incredibly easy project.

I took them all off when I was painting the cabinet doors and plunged them in a bucket of my favorite pre-paint cleaner Dirtex and gave them a really good scrub with a stiff-bristle brush. I'm not sure what was on them, but they were really dirty.

I pulled out one of the many old bedsheets I save for projects like this as well as for moving, protecting plants from an early or late-season frost and covering up the dog bed and just laid them out in the driveway on that. Lest anyone forget how long ago I started this project, just take a look at these pictures. It was fall!

I picked up Rust-Oleum Universal in Titanium Silver, only because it was the only silver-toned metallic spray paint available at the hardware store that day (I would have gone for a satin nickel if it had been available). I've really gotten the hang of spray painting and like everyone says, the key is to do several very light coats. So light that the first few don't really look like much paint has been applied. It's not really until the third time I go over it that it is a different color and I usually do at least one more coat. This all happens in the span of about 15 minutes. When you're doing super thin coats, it doesn't take long for them to dry. I did give them a good hour or so to dry before I flipped them over and did the other side.

Sidenote: When on earth are those Viburnums that I planted to screen the neighbor's shed and never-used boat going to grow enough to do some actual screening? Speaking of which, does anyone want to buy my neighbor's house? Supposedly it's quietly for sale. If you buy it and move that godforsaken boat off the property line, I promise I will offer you first choice of any plants I dig up, divide or don't have room for.

Then I brought in spray paint drying supervisor Hudson to guard them while they dried. OK, I didn't really. He apparently thought that we should have bedsheets in the driveway all the time and why on earth wouldn't you sit on it if someone laid it out all nice like that.

I did have to buy new screws because I figured painting the old ones would be either a big pain or a massive failure or both.

Ack! I wish I had fixed that screw to turn it north-south before taking this picture. I hate when slotted screws aren't lined up.

I've been really impressed with how well the hinges have held up. I'm not seeing any wear on them at all. Granted, these cabinets aren't constantly being opened like they would be in a kitchen situation, but we are rifling through there at least once a day looking for something or other.

So that's the easiest project in this office renovation. Certainly much easier than painting the cabinets, dealing with that crazy counter and even the fabric-covered bulletin board "backsplash."

Easy art

Now that the house renovation is finished it's time to get some art on the walls. Because the budget is gone (and what little is left is going into the landscaping) it's time to get creative.

This might be one of the easiest art projects ever. Ever since I discovered Hudson Valley Seed Library's art seed packs, I knew they were too pretty to just sit in a drawer with the rest of the seeds. I've given several packs as gifts, but this year I ordered a selection of seeds solely for the art packs they came in (although I'm sure I'll use the seeds somewhere or give them away to someone who will).

 

Turning them into art was as simple as cutting a piece of textured watercolor paper to the size of the frame and using some spray adhesive to glue the opened seed pack to the paper. Then I stuck them in very inexpensive frames I picked up at Michael's with a coupon. Of course since I can't seem to leave well enough alone, I spray painted the black framed white.

What I love about this project, other than that it took about 30 minutes including the time to paint the frames, is that it could be perfect for a children's bedroom or playroom if you picked some of the more whimsical packs such as the super cute Fox Cherry Tomato or the Tiny Tim Tomato.

 

Or if you're a proud New Yorker or you just love the city, how about the New Yorker Tomato? I could see this see pack looking very cool hanging in a mini display wall of scenes from New York or a collection of maps.

In fact, the hardest part of this project was choosing which art packs to frame and limiting myself to just three. I chose Stair Fair Zinnia, Spotted Trout Lettuce and Aunt Molly's Ground Cherry because I thought they worked best with the colors going on in the kitchen, but I also love Gift Zinnia, Good Bug Blooms and Rainbow Chard among so many others.

Breaking the barriers of paint technology

You know how people say "We can put a man on the moon but we can't _________ (fill in the blank)?"

Well now there is one less thing to say that about. I got an e-mail this morning from My Perfect Color announcing that they can now make you a can of spray paint in ANY COLOR. That's right, you can now pick beyond the 15 or so colors commonly offered in spray paint and you can specifically color match it for your project.

Now, this product needs to be tested for sure, because not all spray paint is created equal. Some just works much better than the rest, but I have a mind to order a can to give it a shot as I have a spray painting project in the works soon (just wait until you see what I'm going to spray paint. Hide your husbands, ladies, because they are going to cry at the horror of it.)

They describe it as a high-quality, industrial-grade spray paint "perfect for painting accessories, railings, grates, registers, crafts and anything else." Well, that about covers it, I guess. It's available in semi-gloss and gloss (too bad because I'm a fan of the satin finish, but beggars can't be choosers.

It sells for $19.99 for a 16-ounce can, which is insanely expensive, but as far as I can tell, they have a lock on the ability to give you spray paint in any color, so I guess that's how they get away with it. Right now there is a coupon for $5 off with the code SCCoupon5A. Free shipping is standard on orders over $50.

To order it, type in the color you want (they offer color matching to almost any brand of paint other than, sadly, Farrow & Ball and Ellen K.... whatever that other one is. 

I've ordered from My Perfect Color in the past and they do a great job of color matching and ship quickly.

So, what do you think? Would you spend $20 for color-matched spray paint?