Haint blue, smurfy it ain't.

I caught the guys just in time (about a month ago)
to paint my front porch roof sky blue. I even bought the paint for them so I could pick just the right color. My porch roof is sky blue here in NJ, and I have always loved it.

If you read the earlier posts, you would have seen when they accidentally painted the front door blue, but now that the colors are in the right places, I am very happy with the results.

So when I went up to NY again last week, Jim asked how I liked my blue roof. I told him I loved it, and asked what he thought. He said it was too "smurfy" for him.

That got me thinking why I liked the blue roof, and where I had gotten the idea. I had heard it was a Victorian thing, and my 1880-something house in NJ is a wannabe Victorian. When I talked to Susan the architect, she said she had heard it called Spider Blue, because supposedly spiders and wasps don't like to build their webs/nests under a blue roof. And the guy who sold me the paint told me it was a Southern thing, and that this was a Haint color. Haint for "haunt" meaning the blue is supposed to keep away the evil spirits.

So I went online and researched Haint blue, and found all kinds of interesting information about it. Here are a few links, just in case you find this as interesting as I do.

http://www.squidoo.com/haintblue

http://colorstr.ipower.com/store/page2.html

This last one:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5645263

is from the NPR show, All Things Considered. It pretty much covers all the theories, and was enough to convince me that my blue roof isn't smurfy at all. Susan approves as well, so Jim, you're just wrong!