Why Garnet?

What is the “Garnet” in “Garnet School”?

Back in 2016, we built “The Barn”, which is a building that is designed as a workshop to build tiny houses. It is tall enough to accommodate the largest trailer that is allowed on the freeways, and wide enough to work on the trailer with room to move around.

When we put on the siding, it was raw plywood (T-111) and needed paint. So I went down to Lowes. Every Lowes has a “mis-tint” area in their paint department. This is where cans of custom tinted paint go if they do it wrong, or if the customer never shows up to pick up their custom color.

You can get some pretty good deals here, as long as you don’t need a particular color. Well, that’s exactly why I was there.

They had many gallons of various colors, but only one 5-gallon bucket. And I knew I’d need more than that. So I looked at the name of the color, Royal Garnet. I really didn’t care about the color itself, but it was sort-of reddish and barns are supposed to be red, right?

So I bought this bucket, at a deep discount, and started to paint the barn. Five gallons of paint doesn’t last long when you’re using a sprayer, but that was the only way to paint the T-111 since there are vertical canyons that are tough to roll out.

I ended up buying another two 5-gallon buckets (at regular retail price this time), and finished the job. The barn looked great.

A couple years later, we built a wood shop. Also using T-111 siding. So the natural decision as far as paint color would be Royal Garnet.

A third building, the “Sugar Shack” needed a fresh coat of paint. Royal Garnet.

When we were looking for a name for our new school, Cynthia suggested “Garnet School”. I’m not sure if she meant that as a joke, but I really liked it and here we are. The name is generic enough that it could be used for anything, but it has a specific history on the property that is evident when you come by and see that Garnet is a color that is used for the buildings around here.