IKEA White

No, you don’t snort it, smoke it, or shoot it.  And–at least so far–buying a can of it doesn’t send the store cash register into a catatonic state from which it can’t recover until the attendant certifies that I am over the age of 18, or 21, or whatever its halfwit electronic brain has shut itself down over, while it awaits actual human input. (This seems to be happening more-and-more often, for more-and-more ridiculous items each time.)

It’s paint.

It’s a highly useful paint around here, the formula for which the very nice young man in the Home Depot paint department and I came up with a few years ago, when I bought an IKEA™ BILLY bookcase, put it in a bathroom as a medicine cabinet, drilled the hole for the doorknob on the wrong side, and then had to fix the mess.

Since then, I’ve bought and installed several more BILLYs, a few KALLAXs, numerous other brands of ‘knock-together’ pieces of cabinetry and storage units, and I am currently in a hell of my own making, putting in what seems like miles and miles of baseboard and door trim.  (I cannot understand how what’s a relatively small house requires so much of the stuff.  And–despite my heroes–Ron and John’s–best efforts, most things here still aren’t “plumb, level, or square,” so the measuring and cutting is a nightmare.)

Also, over the course of the last 15 years, I’ve replaced all the doors and windows.

What I (and the local Home Depot computer) recognizes as a paint color called “IKEA White” (they put that in there just for me so I could find it again, bless them!) is formulated as follows:

The base used is “White, 7900” and the paint itself is:

Now, you can go online and search for “IKEA white paint matching,” and find all sorts of options, may of which relate to paint brands I’ve never heard of, and which may not be available in one country or another.  My solution is for the United States, is widely available at your local Home Depot, and works quite well.

What’s especially nice is that you can–if your pantry, your bathroom, your bedroom, or any other room features an IKEA component in white–use it for just about everything else from every other brand that’s “white” in there, and the match is quite good.  (It’s not exactly “Marvin Window White,” but it is close enough for gubmint work, and good enough for me.)

The alternative–which consists of (potentially) weeks or months of study of the paint cards at specialized paint sellers (I expect a PhD in color theory might be helpful) and choosing a particular one for each individual circumstance –is, the older I get, just too horrible and time-consuming to contemplate. Have you seen how many “whites” there are at Sherwin Williams? I have.  And many of them are, in quart and sample sizes, on my shelves, sitting useless because–when I got them home–they weren’t exactly fit for purpose and they argued, however gently, with something else in the room.

This is a pretty good, and very acceptable, shortcut.

Next up: BILLY Blue!  We haven’t quite got that right yet (something to do with reflectivity, he tells me).  But it’s only a matter of time….)

**IKEA™ is a trademark of Inter IKEA Systems B.V., NETHERLANDS.  The use of its name, WRT the paint mentioned implies only that it’s such a ubiquitous part of the home remodeler’s arsenal that the ability to find a matching paint is almost required if one is to make its components fit into the general color scheme.