We got our order of milk paint, all 160 pounds of it. yes pounds. Not gallons. It comes in powder form and you add the water. It is produced by The Old Fashioned Milk Paint Co. and their web site is the very clear MilkPaint.com.
They have a new line of paint called Safe Paint. I have to say I’m in love with it.
It is real paint.
It makes the other synthetic paints we have all been bamboozled into thinking was paint look like crap. It is the difference between eating over processed hormone packed Mc Donald’s food and a healthy organic meal.
One is crap the other is vibrant with life.
And this paint is alive. It is made with a whey base, literally a derivative of milk. When you put it on the walls it smells of a country barn. It is a fresh smell of cut grass and healthy animals. The smell is faint but if you ever lived on a farm you know the smell. It is a smell that can literally bring you back to your childhood for an intoxicating moment.
The smell is gone in half an hour, though. And then there is nothing…..nothing. No smell……
You have to try it to see how powerful that LACK of smell is. And to think we have been putting chemicals on our walls for so many years. Petrochemicals laced with synthetic hormone disruptors and cancer causing ethers. That nice Benjamin Moore, yup, it’s crap. Martha Stewart? Crap. Ralph Lauren? Crap.
At Eco Brooklyn we have a motto. In fact we have many but one of them is that if we can’t build with a nine month old in the room then don’t build with it. Coincidentally my son is nine months old and he is with me a lot of the time. So I take this really seriously.
You can practically drink milk paint. I have no problems being in a freshly painted Milk Paint room with my son. I would never do that with the synthetic paints. Even the zero VOC stuff. It is still full of chemicals.
This is the real stuff. This is paint. It is free of chemicals. It is good stuff.
And the process is empowering.
The universe is full of millions of colors. And now that I can mix my own I am free to make my own unique color. Nobody in the world has a color exactly like the one we are painting onto the Green Show House in Brooklyn. In fact tomorrow we probably won’t be able to mix it again exactly. That is a special thing. I love it.
Take back your painting. Use Milk Paint.
First we mix the white base with water. Then we add the color as we want it;
The paint goes on just like any other. You don’t need primer. You just put two coats of the paint. I dries really fast and the second coat can go on quickly.
We got a lot of colors. You want to follow these steps to be sure it works nicely. First put some water in the bucket. Then put the white base. This way none of the paint sticks in the corners of the bucket. Then add small quantities of the color until you get what you want. That way you don’t add too much color. Don’t froth the mix with the mixer because if you get too much air into the mix it bubbles and creates possible color inconsistencies.
We got five colors. Warm one for north facing rooms and cool ones for south facing rooms.
The genius of the Milk Paint Co is that they “only” provide a handful of colors. At first you might see this as odd when most paint companies are bending over backwards to provide huge color variations. But the other paint companies are stuck in the mass consumer idea that more is better and that the consumer is an idiot who can’t think for themselves.
With the colors that the Milk Paint Co provides you can mix your own plethora of colors. It is really, really liberating. I can’t understate that. You will discover that you are, like everyone, a very creative person. You will find your unique color. Or it will find you. Or you will find each other as you play alchemist above the cows white pot. It is a great thing.