Talking Home Renovations with the House Maven
In this episode, I meet with Cindy Gelormini to talk about choosing paint colors for your home. Cindy is a color consultant and paint expert.
Katharine MacPhail 00:08
Hello, and welcome to Talking Home Renovations with the House Maven. I am your host Katharine MacPhail. I’m an architect, and I practice in eastern Massachusetts mostly on renovations and additions to existing homes. I started this podcast as a way for homeowners to learn everything they could about home renovations. Now I interview other architects, contractors, vendors, experts, and homeowners about their home renovations. Today is one of the expert episodes, where I’ve been joined by Cindy Gelormini otherwise known as the ‘Paint Diva of New Jersey’. She’s a color consultant and Benjamin Moore color expert, with thirty years of experience in the interior design world. She painted murals and faux finishes in the 90s and early 2000s, then in 2005 she hung up her brushes to become an in-store designer at a paint store, where she found her niche and became an expert in her field. She has worked with thousands of buyers and sellers staging their properties, and sold real estate for five years. Her book on how to choose paint and paint colors should be released this Fall
Katharine MacPhail 01:18
‘The Paint Diva of New Jersey’. I’m surprised that name wasn’t already taken. That seems like a pretty good title.
Cindy Gelormini 01:26
It was already taken, by a guy in Florida. I think he did garage doors or something, it was odd. When I looked it up to get the website, ‘The Paint Diva’ was taken so I just added the NJ for New Jersey.
Katharine MacPhail 01:41
So, you’re a color consultant?
Cindy Gelormini 01:44
Yep, that’s what I do. I worked in a Benjamin Moore store for eleven years, and I built up a clientele base from being there. People started hiring me to come to their house and help them do their paint colors, and it just took off. That’s what I do, people hire me to come to their house and I help them choose their paint colors. They always say it’s a lot harder than they thought it was gonna be, and they call me in crisis, like “Oh, the painters are coming tomorrow and I need my colors, I don’t know what I’m doing, I didn’t think it was gonna be this hard”. In the beginning I used to complain that people were unorganized, and then I realized no, you know what, that’s why I have a job.
Katharine MacPhail 02:25
Exactly how do you help them pick the paint? Do they already have options, and you just…?
Cindy Gelormini 02:31
I look at their home, and I look at their stuff. I usually start in the kitchen – I go in there and I look at the color of their cabinets, their backsplash, and their countertop. Usually there’s a certain style. I went to a house today where this woman has her kitchen fully Tuscan style, with all the tumbled marble and the granite. She literally had cookbooks from Tuscany, and cucina up on the wall.
Katharine MacPhail 03:03
Okay, so she’s really going for it.
Cindy Gelormini 03:05
Uh huh. And houses like that are a lot of warm colors, usually golds and olive greens. It’s usually gold, green, and red with a lot of warm beiges. It’s been ten years since they painted, and they want to freshen it up but I still have to pick a color that goes with their stuff.
Katharine MacPhail 03:25
Right.
Cindy Gelormini 03:26
Almost everybody that I work for wants neutrals. 95% of them all want gray. So what I do is, I start with a really fast color lesson. I show them the grays, starting with the historical colors by Benjamin Moore. They’re all on one strip, and I show them the top three – Coventry Gray, Stonington Gray, and Wickham Gray. These are cool grays, they’re silvery and lean toward being a little on the blue side. The ones underneath them, Revere Pewter and Edgecombe Gray, are warm grays. Everybody knows Revere Pewter, they’ve seen it online, they probably even have it in their house somewhere. People think they can’t see the difference in the colors, that they all look the same. So when I put them next to each other and I show them the difference, that’s when they start to understand. The next thing I do is move over to the classic colors. I have it narrowed down to about six strips that have grays on them and I tell them look, these are the grays, anything beyond this is going to be blue, green, purple, whatever. There’s one strip in the middle that is cool gray. It has Horizon and Gray Huskie on it, which look a lot like those cool grays in the historical colors. Then I’ll show them the warmer grays, Balboa Mist, Shoreline, and Nimbus, which are not quite as warm as Revere Pewter. I get our selection down to kind of those three strips. And that’s where we almost always end up while choosing colors, is right in that range.
Katharine MacPhail 05:01
That’s interesting. Why is everyone going for grays these days, do you think?
Cindy Gelormini 05:06
Because everybody does what everybody else does. I think it starts with girls in middle school actually, as soon as they start having friends. But honestly, I think a lot of it has to do with people being afraid of color. Now people will say to me, oh, I heard gray is going out. And I’m like, well, it’s not really, but I’m not doing the deeper darker grays anymore. I’m moving toward more of the off whites. I find that the grays that are a little bit warmer tend to match a lot of stuff that’s out there. For instance, I have people that just bought a new house where I live in New Jersey. It’s right on the train line to New York City – a lot of people left New York, and they all are moving out here. They want to paint the whole place and do the floors before they move in, but they don’t have furniture yet.
Katharine MacPhail 05:58
Right.
Cindy Gelormini 05:59
So in those situations I tend to stick to my tried and true paint colors that I use every day, because I’ve seen enough furniture and things to know that what I use goes with a lot of what’s out there right now. So I’ll use those, and that way when they go and buy furniture they’re not going to have any trouble finding something to match their paint colors. I prefer to go the other way around, for them to have furniture first. But that doesn’t always happen. Especially now after COVID, it takes people six months just to get a couch.
Katharine MacPhail 06:33
Yeah, that’s true.
Cindy Gelormini 06:33
Which is a problem. And in the kitchen – for instance, when I went to this Tuscan kitchen today, she has tumbled marble and granite and her walls are gold. It’s a beige that has a lot of gold, with a greenish undertone to it. She wants something new, but she still likes warm colors. I’m still going to choose a neutral for her, but I’m gonna try to make it a little bit grayer so it looks like a newer version. Because the color she has on the walls now, I know right away it’s from 12 years ago. It’s just outdated. Grayer colors are more updated, but I’m going to help her find more of a grage that goes well with her stuff. Most granite has beige and gray in it, so those grage colors just work well.
Katharine MacPhail 07:30
Which shades would you say are grage?
Cindy Gelormini 07:33
Revere Pewter is a grage, but it’s usually too dark and has a slightly greenish undertone to it. So I actually don’t use it that often. The one next to it, the Edgecomb Gray, is a little bit lighter so I use that more. But for a lot of people it’s too beige. So here’s the difference – when I do new construction homes, everything is cool grays and whites. But if your house is not new, you still have your older furniture and you just want to make everything look a little more updated, then you use the warm grays because they go better with all those warmer beige tones.
Katharine MacPhail 08:18
Interesting.
Cindy Gelormini 08:19
A lot of people are painting their kitchen cabinets now.
Katharine MacPhail 08:23
Yeah, I just painted mine.
Cindy Gelormini 08:25
Did you?
Katharine MacPhail 08:26
Well, I didn’t do it myself. I hired somebody this time, so it actually looks pretty good.
Cindy Gelormini 08:31
Yeah. So that’s a big thing that comes up a lot. People will ask me if I think it’s worth painting the cabinets or not.
Katharine MacPhail 08:38
Are people doing colors on the cabinets, or just gray?
Cindy Gelormini 08:41
I love colored cabinets, but it’s a hard sell for me. Most people just want the all white kitchen because it’s safe, and that’s what they’ve seen a million times. It depends on the client. If it’s a young family with three kids under the age of five, I usually try to talk them out of doing the all white. Especially if they have tumbled marble and granite and there’s no white in the granite. White is just too stark, it doesn’t look right. Unless you’re gonna change your countertop and your backsplash, white just doesn’t work. You really want more of an off white. So I usually have them do an off white that has a gray undertone, because fingerprints and scuff marks are gray. It hides a multitude of sins. And it’s always the young moms that want an all white kitchen, while having two little kids and a dog. I’m like, you’re crazy!
Katharine MacPhail 09:41
Yeah, that’s true.
Cindy Gelormini 09:42
Those walls are gonna be filthy really soon. So I usually try to get them to do an off white that has a little bit of a gray undertone, just enough just to hide the fingerprints and dirt everywhere. I’ll tell you one of my favorite ones, it’s called Silver Satin. If you look in the off whites by Benjamin Moore you’ll find it. Each color in the off whites has something in it – a little yellow, a little peach, a little pink, a little green, anything else you can think of. There’s one strip that Horizon is on, that’s cool grays – the silvery ones that can turn baby blue sometimes. Then you’ve got your warmer grays which are Balboa Mist, Collingwood, Classic Gray, and Silver Satin which does not have yellow undertones to it. It’s just a nice, clean neutral. It’s very nondescript. You’re not going to walk into a room where it’s painted and say, oh, that’s a gray room. You kind of can’t tell. So that’s one of my favorites.
Katharine MacPhail 10:36
So, it’s interesting that you say certain grays turn blue. As I said before, we just painted our kitchen, which was a pretty big change. We painted the cabinets blue, though I can’t remember what shade of blue without looking it up. And then we painted the walls gray, but they absolutely look like blue.
Cindy Gelormini 10:57
Right, because it’s really a silvery gray.
Katharine MacPhail 10:58
Yeah, it looks totally light blue. Everybody would swear up and down it was light blue. It definitely was gray on the can, but on my walls? I mean, I am an architect, so I’m aware that colors look a bit different depending on where you put them, but I’m still shocked.
Cindy Gelormini 11:13
There’s two reasons why that happens. One, if you have a really warm backsplash and you try to put a silvery gray next to it, the warm tones are going to make that silver look more blue. It depends on what it’s next to. Two, something I learned from working with a photographer/graphic designer on my book, is that daylight is blue. It’s cool. I always knew that your light bulbs are generally warm. Sometimes it’s a little yellowy, a little peachy, right? But if you take that color, even a warm gray, and you bring it over to the window it’ll turn blue or purple because of the daylight. It looks very cool. So it depends on your light.
Katharine MacPhail 11:26
That’s true. It’s just a lot cheerier than I thought it was gonna be. But that’s okay, I can go for cheery.
Cindy Gelormini 12:25
What does your floor look like? Is it hardwood, is it tile?
Katharine MacPhail 12:28
Yeah, it’s just a hardwood floor. We decided to go with Golden Oak I think, to match the rest of the house. But our cabinets are pretty deep blue, so maybe it’s…I don’t know. I’m just going for it. I’m just embarrassed at how surprised I was that it looked like it was blue. Because I should have known better.
Cindy Gelormini 12:51
Yeah well, sometimes you just don’t know until it goes up.
Katharine MacPhail 12:54
Anyway, it’s fine. I also heard blue cabinets are out now. Not that I really care.
Katharine MacPhail 12:59
Well, that’s just what someone told me. But I like that color, so that’s what I painted them. I mean, if we sell our house sometime soon maybe people will be afraid of our kitchen, but I don’t know. I don’t really care. They can do what they want after I leave.
Cindy Gelormini 12:59
They’re out now?
Cindy Gelormini 13:00
Well, you painted the cabinets. It’s not like you ripped it out and put in a whole new $100,000 kitchen. So I wouldn’t worry.
Katharine MacPhail 13:24
Yeah, I’m not that worried.
Cindy Gelormini 13:26
And that’s funny that somebody said blue kitchens are out, because I haven’t even gotten anybody to do a blue kitchen yet. We’re still in the white kitchen phase. Occasionally, I’ve done navy blue on the bottom and white on the top. I can talk people into doing blue in a bathroom, or maybe in a laundry room, because that way it’s just one cabinet. It’s not the whole kitchen.
Katharine MacPhail 13:47
Yeah. Yeah, that’s true.
Cindy Gelormini 13:51
Here’s the thing, I have two different discussions with people. If you’re going to sell your house, then we’re going to choose colors that are going to appeal to your buyer. If it’s for you, then you do what you want.
Katharine MacPhail 14:02
Yeah, well, it is just paint but it’s not free. So how did you become a color expert? You used to be a painter of murals and that sort of thing?
Cindy Gelormini 14:16
Yes, when my kids were little I painted murals in their rooms, and at my realty job too. Then I had my fourth child, who had special needs, which became a full time job in itself. I decided not to go back to the office, since I needed to be home at three o’clock when everybody got home from school. So I started painting murals for other people. There was an interior designer I knew because our kids played together. She came over to my house one day and hired me to do a job. Then she started asking me to do faux finishes – remember the 90s and the fauxs ?
Katharine MacPhail 14:55
Oh yeah, I do.
Cindy Gelormini 14:57
You know the sponging, the glazing, the stenciling, all that kind of stuff. I did that for ten years. I knew that the faux finishes were going out of style. I never really liked doing them anyway, I did them because they paid the bills. Also, a lot of people in new construction homes with twenty-four foot ceilings would ask me to do a faux in the foyer – one day I was up twenty feet on a ladder and I almost fell off. So I said that’s it, I’m not doing this anymore. I was working with a friend at the time and I just told her, “it’s all yours, you take it”. Pretty soon after I walked into a paint store to get paint for a project I was doing in my own house. I never pay a painter, I always paint my own house – so if I mess up, it’s only the cost of a can of paint. Right?
Katharine MacPhail 15:45
Right.
Cindy Gelormini 15:47
I walked in there, and the owner knew me because I did murals for all of his kids. And he said, “I can’t believe you’re here, I need someone to come work for me and help women choose paint colors all day”. Because one of his competitors had hired a designer to work in the store. So I said sure, why not, if all I have to do is choose a color. As long as I don’t have to carry paint cans up ladders anymore. So I developed the paint department there. He had two other stores, so I trained the people he hired to work at those places and while I was doing that I just sort of created this position as a color consultant. There was really nobody else out there that was doing it. I was just good at it, because I had already been working with paint. The difference between what I do and what an artist painting on a canvas does is they use oils and acrylics and things. I always used regular wall paint, like Benjamin Moore. So I knew the colors, what would happen if you watered them down or this and that. So it was pretty easy, and I started developing methods to make it easier. Like if somebody came in and said, “I want to pick a color for my living room”. Well, tell me about your living room. Everyone’s living room doesn’t look exactly the same. So I ask them questions like, what color is your couch? Do you have an area rug? What about your pillows? Is there a fireplace, and if so is it brick or is it marble? So that way I’d start getting sort of a mental picture. And then I started getting smarter – I would tell people to bring me a cushion off the couch. Because someone would say “oh, my couch is beige”, but there’s many different shades of beige. Right? So I’d say bring me a cushion off the couch, a pillowcase off of your bed, whatever. People literally rolled up their area rugs and stuck them in the trunk of their car. But it was so much quicker and easier if I could just see what they had in the house. So I would help them choose the best color – I would look at the pages and I’d say this one’s too green, this is too pink, this one’s a little purple, this one’s perfect. And I would immediately pull them away. I was pulling away all the confusion. I’d get it down to one or two chips, and I say “Okay, which one do you like, the lighter one or the darker one”. That makes it so much clearer for them. But without the cushion, I would have to make an educated guess.
Cindy Gelormini 18:21
In the beginning I’d give clients about six different pages to take home, to see if any of them worked. But also, that’s how I learned – people would come back and say “this color turned peach in my house”. I figured, well, it’s got to be something with the light bulbs, the change of color. And then I learned how to fix it. I would have a warm beige and it would turn yellow in a lot of houses, so then I learned that’s how you get a nice soft yellow. What you really want is a beige with yellow undertones. You don’t go to the yellow section and choose, because even the lightest yellow on that strip is still too yellow.
Katharine MacPhail 18:21
Right.
Katharine MacPhail 19:00
Interesting.
Cindy Gelormini 19:01
A woman walked in one day and she said “oh, I wanted a soft butter yellow, but it looks like somebody threw up lemons all over my walls”. It was because she went to just the lightest yellow, I told her you have to add beige to tone that down. And just like your kitchen, a lot of silvery grays I used were turning blue. So I learned if I want a really soft blue, what I really want is a silvery gray. That’s how you turn blue down, is by adding gray. It was all just sort of trial and error. I worked with thousands of people so after a while, you know, you start to see patterns there.
Katharine MacPhail 19:39
Yellows are really, really hard. Especially when you see yellows on the outside of some houses, you’re like, that was the wrong color yellow for you to paint that house.
Cindy Gelormini 19:50
Yes. So anything that says bisque or buff in the name is a beige with yellow undertones to it. Start there, unless you really want strong yellow. There’s a few colors that were made specifically for exteriors. So if somebody wants gray – like right now, all anybody wants is gray. There’s colors by Benjamin Moore that used to say EXT at the end of the name, meaning exterior. They were literally made for that. They’re no brainers, you can’t go wrong. They’ve switched it, now they’ve moved them over to the historical collection, but let’s see…see this section over here? These were made for exteriors. Here’s the grays, here’s the really dark greens that people would use to put on their shutters, here’s the reds that you use for the front door. This is Briar Wood – if you want taupe, Briar Wood is the one to go to. This is Platinum Gray, the lighter one is Cliffside Gray. I’ve been using this one, the Charcoal Slate, which is really cool. It’s a deep, deep gray. So start here.
Katharine MacPhail 21:02
How did you find those? How do people find those particular colors?
Cindy Gelormini 21:09
They have three fan decks. If you get the one that says “collections” that has the historical colors in it, they’re all the way in the back. It depends on how old the fan deck is. See, in mine, they say PM which means premixed colors. But the newer fans might not be labeled that way, they might be integrated. That’s why I’m telling you the actual names. So Platinum Gray, Charcoal Gray, Cliffside Gray, start there. Then, if you don’t find what you want, go to the historical colors because the historical colors are pretty failsafe for exteriors also.
Katharine MacPhail 21:45
Yeah, that’s what I usually tell people too. I feel like they worked it out with those historic colors, you know?
Cindy Gelormini 21:49
Yes. Then they came out with the Williamsburg Collection, which is similar, but I don’t tend to use those colors. Maybe Bone Black, which is another gray.
Katharine MacPhail 22:02
Bone Black. I don’t know if I know that one.
Cindy Gelormini 22:04
Yeah, it’s just another gray. But the Williamsburg is its own separate fan book, it’s not in the collections. So maybe that’s why, if you don’t have that fan you wouldn’t know it. But that’s a good gray too, it’s a warm gray.
Katharine MacPhail 22:20
What about black houses? Some architects I know are getting upset about people painting their houses black.
Cindy Gelormini 22:26
I like it, I think it’s dramatic. The only issue is it’s hot. It soaks up the heat. I had a friend that had a black front door and the sun beat on it every day. It would chip, and she had to repeat it every year. So she had to finally put a portico over her front door to try to block the sun a little bit.
Katharine MacPhail 22:48
It’s always good to have some protection over your front door because a lot of the doors can’t really take that kind of heat.
Cindy Gelormini 22:56
Yeah, that’s my only concern with a really dark color. But I think it’s cool. So yeah, when it comes to exteriors, I would have people bring me photos of their house. I started to realize people think if you have a short house, like a ranch or cape, they think, “oh, I’ll paint my house white and it will look bigger”. No. So if you look at the picture of it, especially on a cape, you’ll see the whole top half is roof and the whole bottom half is the siding. I learned that if you blend the color of the house with the roof, now you have a whole big rectangular shaped house. To me, a two story center hall colonial is sort of the perfect shaped house. So if the house is low and short, if you blend it with the roof, now you have that bigger rectangular shape. That’s why I use Charcoal Slate, that darker gray, on capes that have an off black roof. And then if you’ve got white trim around the windows, you do a nice pop of color like turquoise or yellow on the front door, then it looks fun.
Katharine MacPhail 24:12
Yeah, that’s a great idea.
Cindy Gelormini 24:13
Or if it’s a lighter gray roof, then I do the lighter gray house.
Katharine MacPhail 24:17
I love that, it makes so much sense. That had never occurred to me.
Cindy Gelormini 24:23
I realized it when I was looking at the photos. That’s probably just the artist in me looking at that. Like, how do we make that look more grand?
Katharine MacPhail 24:34
Especially with the fun color doors. I mean, to me that’s pretty low effort to make that a fun bit.
Cindy Gelormini 24:42
I realized that I like to lead people to the front door, that I like the front door to stand out. I usually go for something tone on tone, like with the shutters and everything, but then do the pop on the front door. I always tell people look, it’s about $15 to pour the paint and it takes a half hour to paint it. It’s the easiest thing, don’t worry about the door. Have some fun with it now, and if you get sick of it, you can repaint that easily. The big money is hiring the painter to paint the whole house.
Katharine MacPhail 25:09
Yeah, that is the big money. So if somebody needed help with choosing their paint colors, are there a lot of people like you who make house calls?
Cindy Gelormini 25:22
Not that I know of. I guess it depends on where you’re from. Where I live, there was sort of a big corporate buy out of a lot of the smaller mom and pops. A big company bought out a lot of the dealers, and places like that don’t have people like me in their stores. They don’t think that it’s worth it. Which is good for me, because as an independent person I can run around and work for everybody. And interior designers, they don’t really like to just choose paint colors – they’re looking for the whole design client. I guess they’ll do it, but it depends on how busy they are. Stagers, I think, are a good person to call. A lot of stagers choose colors for people before they sell the house.
Katharine MacPhail 26:13
True.
Cindy Gelormini 26:15
They pretty much have their one or two colors that they like, though, and they just have everybody do the same color. I’ve gone into some homes where I’m like, that might have worked in ten other houses, but not this one. But I’m sure they probably have the index. I also do virtual consults though.
Katharine MacPhail 26:38
Oh, really? That’s interesting.
Cindy Gelormini 26:39
Yeah, I did a video a few years ago about this cute little tudor home. And the woman I was working with, she didn’t like it. She didn’t like all the dark wood beans and everything, she wanted something different. So I reversed it. Instead of the white stucco with the dark brown beams, I made the stucco darker like a tuape-gragey color. And then I did all the beams white, but like an off white so it looked more like the inside of her house with the gray walls and the white trim. She loved it. So after I did this little video on my phone, I popped it on YouTube and I got calls from people all over the country who have tudors that want to do that. A lot of people that buy tutors, they just don’t like that dark brown. Some people do, they like the whole classic look, and other people just want to give it a fresher look. A lot of the houses aren’t really tudors either, I call them the wannabe tudors. It’s really just the colonial with a couple of beams on the front to sort of give it that look. So yeah, I’ve done virtual consults for people that were Arizona, California, Florida…
Katharine MacPhail 27:47
So how do people get in touch with you, if they’re looking for a consultation?
Cindy Gelormini 27:50
Well, what they need to do first is they have to get the fan decks. So they have to go to their local paint store. I’ll also do Sherwin Williams, but I know Benjamin Moore inside and out because that’s the store that I work for. I tell clients they have to go out and either borrow them from the painter or buy them from their paint store, but they have to have the fan decks. Then we FaceTime, and I’ll tell them to turn to Cedar Key 983, whatever, and hold that up so we can look at it. A lot of tudors have brown windows, so I’ll say, let’s look at this next to your windows and see how it looks. Then we talk about it until we find something that works. And last year with COVID, we had to do that for local jobs too. I did virtual consultations like that, and they just pay me with Venmo.
Katharine MacPhail 28:39
Right. You know, the good thing about that is that people got used to doing stuff like this virtually. And now they will continue. So that’s really a great way to reach people around the world, I guess.
Cindy Gelormini 28:49
That’s when I got the idea to write the book. Because when people call me from California, and they say there’s nobody like me out here and they really need help choosing my paint colors …I realized I have to write a book that tells people how to do it, so they can do it on their own. I can’t multiply myself.
Katharine MacPhail 29:09
So, when is your book coming out?
Cindy Gelormini 29:11
I’m hoping it’s going to come out in the next couple months. It’s almost done, it’s almost there. It’s just been on hold because I released my children’s book series in April, and I’ve been focusing on that so I haven’t been able to finish the other book yet. But hopefully it’ll be out soon. It’ll be a nice Christmas gift.
Katharine MacPhail 29:28
Yeah, that’ll be really great. Do you want to tell me a little about your children’s book series?
Cindy Gelormini 29:35
My children’s book series is called ‘Robbie’s World and His Spectrum of Adventures’. It’s about a little penguin with autism, based on my son Robbie who had severe autism. It tells little stories about him when he was a little boy. In each book there’ll be funny stories, but you’re learning something about autism without really realizing it. For instance, the second book is based on when I was the brownie leader for my two twin girls. Robbie was little at the time. One day during a meeting, he took off and disappeared. When I ran outside, I found him by the brook splashing around. So at the end of every chapter, I have what’s called a ‘mom’s minute’ for the parents or teachers who are reading to the kids, where I explain to the adults things like, say…kids who have autism typically run away a lot. It’s called the eloping, and a lot of times they’re looking for the water. My son was always running for the brook or the pool, the neighbor’s pools, whatever. And so I tell them it’s really important for autistic children to learn how to swim at an early age, to avoid drowning and things like that. I didn’t realize the full potential of it at first, I was just writing stories about my son. I also did all the illustrations – there’s twelve stories, so three-hundred and forty illustrations which kept me busy through my whole lockdown. Once I was done I realized that this is for parents that have newly diagnosed kids, because they always ask the same questions. I’ve joined these Facebook pages on autism, and the same questions come up every day – my kid doesn’t sleep, my kid’s a picky eater, my kid does this, my kid does that. So I tell them, it’s all in the book. All they have to do is read the books, and they’ll get their answers. And then they can also share that knowledge with siblings, grandparents, caregivers, anybody else in your kid’s life. It kind of teaches everybody what autism is like. It’s also good for teachers to read to the class, because there’s a lot of inclusion classes. I’m hoping that kids will fall in love with Robbie the penguin, and then when they see a student who’s maybe stimming or having a meltdown instead of saying, “why is he so weird?” they’ll say, “oh I get it, he’s just like Robbie the penguin”.
Katharine MacPhail 31:40
Well, that’s great. I mean, that’s beautiful. And it’s a visually beautiful book too, I just got a glimpse of one of your illustrations. I’m happy to hear that you have written that, and can help a lot of people that way. And you have a podcast as well, right?
Cindy Gelormini 31:55
It’s called Spectrum Perspectives, and it’s on autism. I interview parents that have autistic kids for the first three weeks of the month, and then the fourth week I interview professionals – so doctors, therapists, attorneys, whatever. I’ve done so many ahead of time that I was able to categorize them, so I kind of get similar interviews, and then we’ll talk to a professional at the end.
Katharine MacPhail 32:21
Spectrum Perspectives. So I guess it would be hard to have a podcast about paint, because it’s a visual thing.
Cindy Gelormini 32:29
I thought about it. But like, yeah, how much can I talk about paint? To get a podcast going, you could talk about interior design I guess. But I’m laser focused on paint. Though with a lot of my clients, when they get ready to sell their house, it’s a whole different conversation I have with them. I do what I call pre-staging appointments, where I like to work with them a couple months before it goes on the market. And I’ll tell them this wallpaper has to go, what furniture pieces to get rid of or put in storage, how to neutralize the walls, and get it ready to put on the market. A lot of my paint clients like to work with me as an interior designer, because I’ve already built their trust, but I always tell them I’m just more of a stager.
Katharine MacPhail 33:25
And that’s thepaintdivanj.com, is that right?
Cindy Gelormini 33:29
Yes, and they can follow me on Instagram or on Facebook as The Paint Diva.
Katharine MacPhail 33:35
I learned a lot about paint today. I need to go figure out what to paint my hallway. I might have to wait until your book comes out and figure it out after that. Well, thanks so much. I hope to talk to you again soon.
Cindy Gelormini 33:49
Yeah, you’re welcome. Thanks for having me.
Katharine MacPhail 33:53
Thanks again to Cindy for joining me, and thank you for listening. I decided to put all of the links to my social media in my show notes, so just look there. Go to my website Talking Home Renovations dot com for transcripts and episode enhancements. Also in the show notes is the link for my newsletter, so sign up for that and you’ll get a little bit of news every Wednesday, plus the episode enhancements sent directly to your inbox.
Katharine MacPhail 34:21
I am on the Clubhouse app. As I mentioned at the beginning, I am trying to build a community over there. So if you want to join me at 10am Eastern on Saturday mornings. My Talking Home Renovations club is a room where we discuss things like how to get rid of your architect in the middle of a project if you don’t like them. If you’re on Clubhouse, come join me there. If you like the show, could you leave a rating and a review and subscribe? I know I’m asking a lot. And here’s one more thing – if you could send it off to a few friends who would like this episode or this podcast as a whole, that would really help me get the word out. Talking Home Renovations with the House Maven is a member of Gabl Media, the most engaged AEC multimedia network on the planet. Check out the other podcasts and video channels that are a part of that network at Gabl Media dot com. That’s G A B L M E D I A dot com. If you’d like a little bit of design advice, and you’re in Massachusetts, check out my ‘Ask An Architect’ design helpline that’s linked in the show notes. This podcast is produced, as always, by my architecture firm Demios Architects, where we believe architects are for everyone. So until next time, take care.