McBride Paint and Wallcovering Blog

This is a great article by Amanda Abrams in the December 8, 2011 edition of the Washington Post on the long forgotten advantages and beauties of wallcoverings. The article describes the shock from the customers when wallpaper was suggested to them. But as the article goes on, the customer is very pleased with their choice to do wallcoverings.

The article also points out the past misconceptions of wallcoverings. One of the biggest concerns customers have with wallcoverings is being able to remove it at a later date. I can tell you as a professional that many wallcoverings are very easy to remove compared to the old days. Many just peel off the wall.

Here are several pictures from the story:

There are no paint finishes that can do this to a room. If you want to make a statement about your decorating, nothing does it like wallcovering

But don’t cover your switch plates! (I hate covering them!)

So if you would like to read the article, here is a link to it for you.

Washington Post’s Amanda Abrams Article “Wallpaper Makes a Statement”

My Uncle in the Washington D.C. area sent me this article that was in the Washington Post this month. Are we going to see a rebirth of wallcoverings? It may be hard since there seems to be no place to buy wallcoverings anymore. But as the pictures demonstrate, nothing can change a room quite like wallcoverings.

Does this mean faux finishes are finally out of style? I sure hope so. If you want you walls to look like stone, leather or rocks, faux finishes are for you. But if you want a Contemporary, French Provincial, Country or Traditional look to your room, nothing can do it better than wallcovering. If you install a country print on the walls, you will instantly have a country look to you décor that you can build on with other accessories. Try that with faux painting.

For more click on the link below

Fresh Look at Wallpaper

Twice this year we saved commercial wallcoverings stripped from renovated areas to use for repairs in the non-renovated areas. Much of the wallcovering in these buildings was installed more that 10 years ago and is outdated and no longer available. However, many buildings still have this outdated wallcovering and these walls are sometimes in need of repair. The left over wallcovering from the original installation is long gone and we use this old wallcovering that has been carefully stripped in full sheets to repair other areas.

So yesterday we re-hung a sheet that several months ago was removed from the first floor and installed it on the third floor where a new tenant was moving into an office suite. I guess you can call this the ultimate in recycling old products.

Installing used vinyl wallcovering does have some draw-backs though. The old vinyl is very brittle and tears easily. It is also very stiff and may not wrap corners very well. The sheet we installed yesterday actually had a slight crease in the sheet that was right at about eye-level and under normal circumstances would be replaced. But with today’s tight budgets, we get buy with repairs like this because there is no money in the till to replace the old and outdated wallcovering.

But on the bright this particular is scheduled to have the corridors redone some time later this year. We  are running out of time for this year and hopefully this project is done in the 4th quarter, with is just around the corner.

Buffet Does Acquisitions The Right Way

I was going to write a blog about how English based ICI Paints purchased most of America’s large successful paint companies and re-branded those companies to their own ICI DuLux brand.  Well I’m still going to write that blog but during my search for information on these ICI acquisitions I discovered Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway bought my favorite paint company – Benjamin Moore.

Buffet has the knack to recognise great companies like Benjamin Moore and purchases them allowing them to operate as though nothing changed.  He doesn’t reinvent them or re-brand them under a new name. If you are a customer of one of the companies he buys, you will never know a difference in the product you are used to buying. You won’t see the name changed to Berkshire Hathaway or some other Buffet company. You also won’t see the company downsized immediately to make more money for Buffet. You won’t have disgruntled executives upset that they were purchased by a conglomerate. They will actually be excited to be part of Buffet’s companies.

ICI Paints Show How To Fail In Acquisitions

ICI on the other hand bought  great paint companies like Martin Seynoor, Sinclair, Glidden, DeVoe, Ameritone Paints and more, and then re-branded them into Dulux Paints. After all, in England you didn’t paint, you “Duluxed” They actually thought that Americans would immediately take to the Dulux name and America will know what Brittain’s had know for years about paint. The Brits can continually show a streak of stubbornness and cockiness that is legendary. This ICI acquisition of these great American paint companies and the arrogant belief that American’s will love DuLux just because the Brits do certainly bears that out.

For instance, in the West ICI bought the very successful regional paint company Sinclair Paints. In the west Sinclair Paints was a major competitor to another Western regional paint company Dunn Edwards.  After ICI bought Sinclair they changed the name to ICI Dulux and lost most of the long time Sinclair customers. In the Midwest they took over DeVoe Paints and did the same to those successful stores. One failure after another.

Sales Call From ICI Sales Rep “Why don’t you buy from us anymore?”

I got called from a salesmen for ICI several years after they acquired Sinclair and he told me they were calling all the old Sinclair contractors to see why they don’t buy their paint anymore. I told him the painters learn to rely on the characteristics of paints and when they are no longer familiar you buy the ones that are, like Dunn Edwards. ICI’s  acquisition of Sinclair Paints, and changing the name and products to DuLux was a big mistake for ICI. But it was a boon for Dunn Edwards because it drove the painting contractors from Sinclair to Dunn Edwards and ICI was never able to get them back.

ICI Becomes Glidden Professional

Now DuLux was a quality product. It was comparable to any of the top paints out there but it could never get name recognition and years after the acquisitions had mostly failed – and there was no way to build these successful companies back to what they once were – they sold the paint division to a Dutch company, Akzo-Noble. Then Akzo-Noble did a smart thing. They knew after all ICI’s failed effort to make DuLux a recognizable name that something had to change. So Akzo changed the name of all ICI DuLux Paint stores to something more familiar to American’s - Glidden Professional. All the stores received new labels for many of the products labeled DuLux. The applied the new labels to the old DuLux cans and now the paint was magically called “Glidden”. The paint was still the same but the label now read Glidden – something very familiar to the American painting contractor.  Time will tell if it works.

Something that is very hard to understand about corporate takeovers is that you would think companies would remember the old cliche, ”imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” and follow Buffet’s very successful business model and lay off the failed business model of companies like  ICI Paints. Had ICI kept everything in place at Sinclair in the style of Buffet, customers would have never noticed. But the corporate bean counters saw savings eliminating duplication. They forgot something though. You still need customers.

Thank goodness ICI never got Benjamin Moore!

We get called for touch-up several times a month. Vacant offices, homes put up for sale or just repairs from a leaky window are just some of the types of touch-ups asked of us. When we get called for these types of services my first question is always “Do you have any of the paint?” My favorite answer is “yes we do”. The touch-up job becomes so much easier now. Even if we open the can and the paint is all dried up, we at least know what the product is and the label should tell us what color it is. If we have all this info we can go buy the original paint and know we have the correct sheen and color. With this type of information on the paint we can do spot touch-up and save the customer lots of money.

However, if we have no paint left over, or the customer has no idea what the color or product was, we will probably not be able to do spot touch-up and will have no choice but to paint corner to corner. So those couple of nail holes from pictures on an otherwise clean wall become very costly to repair. If it is a small stain from a leak on a large living room ceiling, a $75 repair can turn into a $4oo repair real quickyly.

Customers will suggest we just go to Home Depot and have a computer match. From my own personal experience you rarely get an exact match close enough to do spot touch-up. And you don’t know what the exact sheen is either. Not all eggshell finishes will match in sheen so even if you get a pretty good color match, the sheen may not match and you won’t be able to do spot touch-up.

It usually takes several hours to get a close match plus you need a paint chip to take to have matched. Now instead of just spot touch-up of the nail holes or maybe a crack or leak, we have to paint the wall corner to corner. Now a job that may take a couple of hours can end up taking a day or more and cost considerably more in both materials and labor.

So a good piece of professional advice is to always save the paint can or write the product and color number down and place somewhere you will have easy access to will remember. Taped to the inside of a cabinet under the sink is a great place to keep the info for easy retrieval. If you save that paint color it could save you some money in the event of a repair. And when the painter asks if you have paint you will get a smile on his face.

Wallcovering removal is probably the biggest single reason it is in disfavor with so many homeowners. It is expensive to install it and it could cost almost as much to remove it. If it were totally strippable, I think more homeowners would be willing to put it up, since the cost to remove it would minimal.

I recently bid a job at a home that is part of an estate sale. This home has wallcovering in the master bathroom. The walls in the home have a texture and years ago when the WC was installed the walls had to be made smooth for the wallcovering. Now when we remove the wallcovering we will have to re-texture the walls to match the rest of the home. To remove the WC, texture and paint the entire master bath it is going to cost the homeowner about $1000. That kind of expense leaves a lasting impression on why not to use wallcovering. Are the WC manufacturers listening to the customer? Just a few, because we have seen some make wallcoverings that are completely strippable while others are impossibe to remove. For strippable WC just pull the material off, clean the paste off and you are ready to paint. But with non-strippable WC the customer is left with an enormous job when faced with wallcovering removal.

Many years ago I was installing wallcovering on every wall, in every room in a home in Pittsburgh. The homeowner insisted on strippable wallcovering and I made sure every WC was easy to remove – after all I might be the one down the road that had to remove the WC. This was a very smart homeowner because no matter how nice the pattern was, if it was not strippable, I could not put it up. Now there is one downside to strippable wallcoverings. If they come off easily then sometimes you have a double edged sword in that strippable wallcoverings can cut both ways. Let me tell you a little story about the customer I mentioned above.

I was only about 19 years old when I was doing this man’s home. If you could rate a customer on being picky on a scale of 1-10, John Treadwell would be off the scale at about 25. It was amazing that he even let a 19 year install his wallcovering but I was good and he was getting a good deal. I was charging quite a bit less than what the other McBride’s were charging, so he was getting a good deal and he knew it.

I was still living at home and attending Penn State McKeesport and the phone rang on Christmas Day. My mom answered the phone and called me and said “Hey George, John Treadwell is on the phone and he wants to talk to you.” I’m thinking why in the world would John Treadwell be calling me on Christmas Day?” You may already see where this story is heading but at the time I had no idea what he could possibly want on Christmas day since every wall in his house was already wallpapered!

So I answered the phone and a frantic John Treadwell immediately asked me if I could replace one sheet of wallcovering in his  daughter’s room. I tell him “of course” …“But why only one sheet?” He explained that his daughter had gotten a basketball hoop with suction cups for Christmas and went right up to her room and stuck it to the wall. When she pulled it off it tore the strippable wallcovering off the wall. Now you know the rest of the story of the double edged sword of strippable wallcoverings. Sometimes it comes off too easy.

Ok, enough on the wallcovering removal. I have added a DIY section to mcbridewallcoverings.com website and the first DIY lesson is how to remove a wallcovering border. It is the first DIY lesson on the mcbridewallcoverings.com site and I hope to add many more lessons in the days to come. Let me know what you think.

One of the buildings I do work in had a leaky roof and caused wallcovering damage on a window wall in a conference room. The fabric wallcovering was damaged and no longer available. So they needed to select new material for the entire room. I used to take samples to businesses all the time. Now I don’t even have any sample books. So I was a bit nostalgic to have a wallcovering job that even needed samples. It was so nostalgic.

So I called my wallcovering rep up and had him bring me some commercial wallcovering books for the customer to select new wallcovering for their conference room. . Every time I call Joe these days I have to ask him if he is still in the wallcovering business. We both laugh and joke that we are barely still in the wallcovering business.

So I get to the building go to the second floor  and I walk into the reception room and tell the very nice lady there that these are her wallcovering sample books.to select a new wallcovering for their conference room. I was not ready for the cleverness of this lady but she very wittingly said “Did you have to clean the dust off those books?” She could tell by the look on my face that I wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic, or if in fact there WAS dust on the books. I look at her face and realize there was a slight smirk glowing off her. “Oh I get it, Yes I did have to clean the dust off the books.” I quickly respond. She laughs and says “You know, no one uses wallcovering anymore.” Being in the wallcovering business is like being blonde (no offense to the blonde’s out there) since wallcovering seems to be the brunt of people’s jokes.

So this young executive (thirtysomething) takes the books and I was wondering if he even ever saw wallcovering. I’ll have to keep you posted on this one.

I can’t wait to tell Joe the story I am blogging about now. We can wallow in our glory days with this story.

The Wall Street Journal’s Heidi Mitchell recently wrote an article on the comeback and popularity of textured wallcoverings. Here is the link to the article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303848104576383592094811206.html?KEYWORDS=wallcovering

Here is a link to the slide show:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303848104576383592094811206.html?KEYWORDS=wallcovering#articleTabs%3Dslideshow 

Still working on the web-site. Just did a complete redesign of the site and added some pictures. More updating to come including more on the wallcovering section.

We recently did a photo murals installation at DXL, formerly Casual Male Big and Tall, and they looked great. Hope to have some pictures posted soon.