Sherwin-Williams Paint Store

You might as well call Sherwin-​Williams «The Painting Store». The company is still in the headquarters location it was in 1860 (in Cleveland) and S-​W retains its retail paint store approach in the face of incursions of painting departments of the big box home improvement stores. It’s not the only paint-​only specialist left out there, but it’s certainly the biggest and the company with the most experience, collectively.
I can’t attest to the relative quality of paints vs. competitors because you’d have to paint a lot of rooms and houses before doing that; but you can get almost any color at any paint outlet now with computerized mixing and color-​matching. The prices here seem high but are competitive if you wait for the discount windows, particularly if you wait for the 30−40% off sales that don’t occur at the big box stores. Large volume orders, you can negotiate a little discount. What distinguishes the S-​W locations is that they know their painting. It’s not that I haven’t slapped a gazillion coats on various things over the years, I still need a little help with what’s really necessary or how to use this that or the other, with painting projects coming at infrequent intervals, and it’s absolutely clear they know their stuff much better than the random guy on the paint counter at Lowe’s or Home Depot.
This location is just off 7 on State, at the edge of the Woodlawn neighborhood, and the local staff knowledge includes experience with older houses and surfaces.
I’ll repost when my big project is over and let you know how it turned out, but «worth the side trip» adequately describes my experience thus far.