I was once a professional painter. I painted houses in the Middle West and Florida. I liked painting, but it wasn’t a good career choice: I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t smart enough to make it pay.

Painting is a problem for which there is no good answer: you have to choose between regret and mediocrity.

The more I read about paint, the more convinced I became that the choice was not between these two evils, but between these two possibilities: regret and mediocrity. For example, reading about Valspar Paint, what impressed me was how much better the paint looked on my neighbors’ homes than on mine. And how much it improved the appearance of my own house!

I don’t know if they were choosing poorer-quality paint or choosing less skilled painters, or both. But they were clearly not choosing mediocre paint or mediocre painters. And they were clearly making the right choice in both cases.

Since my son was born, I have been painting my kitchen cabinets with the paint from Valspar. I love it. The color is exactly what I wanted, and the consistency is perfect. The finish makes the cabinets look so much better than they ever did in their previous state.

I alerted Valspar that I was a painter and that I wanted to try their paint for my kitchen cabinets. They sent me a set of samples so that I could choose the right color for me.

Valspar also gives you a great guide to selecting your own cabinet colors, and the tips are very useful.

They provide samples, but you should order 2 or 3 cans of each color to make sure that you get enough paint to do your whole project at once. It takes just seconds to put on a coat of paint with a roller, but if you don’t put enough on, you’ll have build-up and then it will be harder to sand off.

If you use Valspar paint on your cabinets or other woodwork, be sure to tell them “I am a painter.”

The big problem with painting houses is that repainting is bad for the environment. Cement boards are not good for the environment. But this is not a problem. I don’t paint cement, and I don’t let my house get painted, but I would if I had to.

I would paint it with Valspar Paint. This is an all-natural paint made from fruit and vegetable oils and beeswax, which gives it the right glossiness and consistency, even in cold weather, even in rain. It can be sanded and finished like any other paint.

Valspar paints are less toxic than ordinary paints, they are better for the environment and they make your house look better.

I would like to talk about one of the ways that Valspar helps its customers. When I buy a can of paint, I benefit from many of the benefits that the company gains from buying my paint. Those benefits include:

1. The advertising: a customer sees my name and address in the newspaper, on TV or radio, or on signs for months or even years after I buy my paint.

2. The loyalty program: As you become a loyal customer, you get offers for special discounts, including a discount on your next purchase when you buy another can of Valspar paint at full price.

3. The “Free Sample” Program: It’s easy to get free Valspar samples with your purchase of four cans or more at retail stores, such as Home Depot and Lowes. And they are free whether or not you order anything else from them (and if you don’t order something else, they give you four free). They call this “Valspar Rewards.”

4. The warranty: If it doesn’t work out, the company will send someone out to fix it for free, plus pay the cost to repair it (usually less than $100), which covers most things that usually go wrong with Valspar products. So

In the mid-1990s, I bought a small house in Portland for less than $100,000. It was a white clapboard house with a red roof and lots of character. But it needed updating.

My house is made of concrete block and stucco. Despite my best efforts, the stucco deteriorated in spots, but the rest of the exterior looked okay at first glance.

The problem was that since it was white, the sun’s ultraviolet rays were bleaching out the stucco. And so over time my house became less white and more gray or tan as the stucco faded. I didn’t mind that too much, but first-time buyers would have been put off by its fading appearance.

I had no idea what to do about it until one day I saw an article about how to paint cement blocks on HGTV’s website. The advice was to use a latex paint that has a high acrylic content (at least 15%), so that part of the mix would be water and part paint.

I bought some from Home Depot and painted the house myself . . . except for one seam where I couldn’t reach it (the stain was under the deck), so I hired an electrician to rent a power sander

It takes several hours to paint a house, and no one likes doing it. But painting isn’t all work; there is also the fun of preparing for it and the satisfaction of seeing the results. And although painting the outside is easy, painting inside the walls is hard. The paint you want won’t stick to the surface it’s supposed to stick to unless you make sure that surfaces are smooth and clean.

But what if you could just pour the right kind of paint into your walls? It wouldn’t matter if they were dirty or dusty or chipped. It wouldn’t matter what color they were originally; as long as they were smooth, it would flow right in.

That would be good news for painters and homeowners, but it would be bad news for carpenters, who would go out of business. They wouldn’t be able to build houses or repair them either because their tools wouldn’t work on rough surfaces anyway.

Recently, I have been thinking about paint colors again. One of my goals is to make the house look nicer so that when people visit, they will feel welcome, not put off by the drab appearance.

I live in a ’50s ranch, and it has a lot of bare walls. The main room is large and was originally an open concept design. There are other rooms as well…

The kitchen has a high ceiling and lots of windows, but is not very bright. It’s painted with a sage green (a color I rather like) that I chose because it had the right tone for the space. My problem was what to do with the other two walls — they were plain white plasterboard…

To make the wall look better, I decided to paint it in a color that would contrast with all of the other areas in my home: pale yellow…

When replacing wall paper or painting, you often face choices between using paint or using wallpaper (or something else). Paints are available in many colors, so you can paint just one wall if you want to stick to one particular theme or just pick whichever color looks nice to you….

Painting my walls in yellow…

Yes, yellow. And the reason for the choice of yellow was