TIPS & TRICKS

"Everywhere you see that YELLOW... 

I want that gone." 

I remember in the early 2000s, every job seemed to have a color with some yellow or gold undertones for the main color. This particular one from Sherwin Williams called Blonde SW6128 was quite popular

Basically, it seemed like everywhere you looked, there was this yellow goldish beige color serving as the main tapestry for most houses. We used to call it the builder's beige since at the time every new house was getting painted with a color along this line.

To go with those colors, we would often see burnt oranges or reds often with sage greens.

Kind of like this (see image)

But that trend changed in 2011...

I remember this so vividly because it's almost as if from one year to the next, everything changed.

From then on out, it seemed like every time I'd walk into a client's house to give an estimate, one of the main things they would say is this  "everywhere you see that yellow, I want that gone".

Seems like people had had...

We are excited to announce that Expressions Painting will now offer the service of CARPENTRY along with our main service of interior repaint.

For years, we have noticed this trend where finding trades people to do small projects getting harder and harder for our clients. Most people tend to be quite busy and it's tough to leave the job site to go and do this tiny small job, which is understandable.

But since we have been doing carpentry for years now, it just made sense for us to offer this service to our clients.

This means, while we're there repainting your home or office, if:

• A door frame needs to be changed
• Some doors need to be realigned
• Some hardware or new door handles need to be replaced
• You want to replace the metal shelves in a closet and install a bunch of customized shelf to increase your storage.
• You’re getting your kitchen cabinets refinished and there there's a piece of molding that's missing or you'd like to add a piece of trim.

Whatever it is, as long as i...

With 2025 now behind us, I thought I'd take a moment to share with you which colors we've actually ended up applying most in our client's home this past year.

Number one: Agreeable Gray SW7029 (Sherwin Williams)

This is a wonderful, gray/beige color and depending on the environment you put this color in, it will lean more towards the gray or towards the beige, especially depending on the lighting. In a lot of cases, this is a color we put in homes where the floors might have a bit of a goldish or amber undertone to it (a bit of yellow or orange tint in the wood color).That tends to remove a bit of the attention from the floor and makes this gray/beige color turn a little bit more on the gray side during the day... and, a bit more on the beige side come evening since the light tends to have a bit of more of the yellow hue in the evening. So it's a nice color, versatile, tends to tie in together all sorts of different wood colors. If you have different color wood like more on the red o...

If there's a way to complete a project in a way that wastes less time and resources, it's a win for everyone.

Here's a way we found to make things a lot more efficient with our commercial projects.

Well, after being away for over 5 years... I"M BACK!

To be honest, for the longest time, I thought that maybe I was done with shooting painting and color videos. 

But then, something really big happened recently that I absolutely wanted to share with all of you.

Choosing colors with Grey Undertones will typically give you the following 2 benefits:

• COVER Better
• PERFORM Better (More washable, Better Adhesion, etc)

But there's another KEY BENEFIT you get for choosing colors with some sort of Grey Undertone which is what I discuss in this week's Tips & Tricks Video. 

There's a vicious cycle happening these days in the Painting Industry that I want to address before it gets out of hands.

Here's the thing...

Paint is not a simple product... far from that.

In fact, some products require years of research and development from highly advanced chemists (often very large teams of chemists) to make it possible for Paint to perform at high levels while being compliant with today's strict environmental regulations.

And depending on the clients needs... and who is going to be applying the paint (a "DIY" or Professional Painter as an example), the "right" paint for the project might be two completely different products.

So where am I going with this?

Well this is such a touchy subject to tackle since "fixing" this vicious cycle will require all parties involved to work together. 

Be sure to watch this weeks video in full for a better understanding of the situation and how I propose we can start changing things around.

There's a lot of items that will typically get added on the TO-DO LIST when buying a new house.

And if PAINTING finds itself on that list, here are 3 KEY BENEFITS you'll experience by making sure to check it off the list the moment you buy a new house.

2 MINUTES LATE:  “Are you almost here?”

6 MINUTES LATE:  “Everyone is here! Where are you?”

13 MINUTES LATE:  “Did you forget about the meeting?”

20 MINUTES LATE:  “Is everything okay, Remi?”

This was a training exercise that our team never forgot…

One of the things that I’m known for is my punctuality. It’s not uncommon for clients to tell me “My gosh, when you say 1:30pm you really mean 1:30pm!”

TIME is a commodity I put a high value on both for others and myself.

So when I told my team “today’s meeting is particularly important so please make sure to be here by 3pm and don’t be late”… NO ONE was late…  except for me!

You see, back in the summer of 2009 we had started to meet every Monday afternoons at 3:30pm for some coaching, bonding & to basically give everyone a chance to voice their concern or offer solutions to existing problems so that we could all learn and grow together as a team.

Back then it had come to my attention that we had received a few phone calls from cl...

Be sure to watch this week's Tips & Tricks video where we'll first show you how this is done using only a paint brush... and then discuss the theory of how this works so you can have a better understanding of your paint brush and how to get the most out of it.