White or.....white?

Here is Rach at her second soccer game -starting to figure it all out. The last one is of her pouting when it was time to give someone else a turn at being goalie.

I completed my first home decorating project-painting the mantel white. I look at it often during the day-and tell myself how cute it turned out :-)

So obviously -with all the apartment living in my past it has been a while since I have headed to the store to buy paint. I had a few minutes after the soccer game and thought I could 'pop' into home depot to buy some paint for the mantel-because it would be easy to pick out since I knew that I wanted to paint it white-unlike the colors of the walls that I have still not decided on. I am sure you can imagine the shock i experienced when I got to the paint isle to find that I would have to choose between: ultra pure white, decorator white, polar bear white, swiss coffee, cottage white, off white, table linen, snow cloud, candlelight ivory or just plain 'white'. WHAT???!!! So what did I do? One of the covers showed a mantel painted white, the fine print revealed it was "swiss coffee" -so I confidently said, "i'll take swiss coffee." At which point I was asked which 'sheen' i wanted. I know I did not want flat - however I was only aware of two other chioces (semi-gloss and high gloss) I thought I wanted semi-gloss until I was informed there was infact: eggshell, satin, sateen. Good grief! Unfortunately my little cheat sheet did not reveal which 'sheen' was used so I was forced to do 'eeny miney moe' to decide on sateen.

After all that, and then having to spend all days saturday painting this small mantle--I think the one thing that I learned was....I am definitely hiring painters to do the rest of the painting.