Haint Blue Ain’t New

Posted on June 8, 2019 by The Owl

While waiting on the rain to pass, I kept adding to my list of things to do with the screened-in porch makeover. I scraped and sanded the furniture for painting last Tuesday. By Friday of that week after plenty of rain, I decided that I really should paint the interior of the screened-in porch. The paint along the horizontal boards flaked off with the slightest touch, and using a water hose on it made it even worse. Some areas showed bare wood. I purchased the white paint on that Friday and knew I could not begin the project until Sunday. By Sunday, the project evolved again.

On that Sunday morning, I sat on the couch eating my breakfast and contemplating the work ahead of me that day. I decided to read online about painting screened-in porches. That’s when I learned about haint blue.

Growing up in Kentucky and traveling in the south throughout my life, I had noticed light blue or aqua ceilings on porches. I didn’t know what it was called and why it was done. In fact, the screened-in porch of the house where I lived until I was eleven had a light aqua ceiling, and I never knew why.

In my research, I learned that haint blue goes back to the Gullah culture of South Carolina and Georgia. The Gullahs believed that a haint (ghost) could not cross water, so they painted doors, window sills, porches, etc with blue paint. Their thinking was that the blue paint would mimic water and deter ghosts from entering the home. That’s why it was called haint blue.

The tradition of painting porch ceilings blue spread across the south and up into the northeast, and along with the expansion other theories popped up. Some people believed that wasps and spiders would not settle on blue paint because it looks like the sky. The insect-deterring nature of the blue paint might have had more to do with early paint formulations than the actual paint color, but the theory stuck.

Boring white ceiling — This is the before picture of our boring white ceiling. Plus, I was never a fan of this arrangement for our edison lights.

As a lover of ghost stories, I preferred the Gullah tales behind haint blue, and on that Sunday morning, I decided I had to have a haint blue ceiling on my screened-in porch. I got dressed and drove over to our local hardware store, Eads Hardware, where I have purchased all the paint for my home. I selected several swatches of blues from their PPG Porter Paints collection. Then I took them home and compared them to our siding (also a blue). Mom came over and deliberated with me on which light blue worked best. We picked “Water Lily,” and I ran back out to Eads to get the paint.

While cutting in the haint blue, I could already see improvement.

When I returned home, I cut in the ceiling with the blue paint, and Graham rolled on two coats of the paint (waiting an hour between coats). We decided to spray paint the lawn furniture between ceiling coats and after the second coat. I pushed off my goal of painting the woodwork until the next day.