In a shed beside a farmhouse on County Road 200 West, two miles west of Alexandria, Indiana, hangs a ball of paint that weighs more than 11,000 pounds and measures nearly 19 feet around. At its centre is a baseball. On 1 January 1977 Mike Carmichael let his three year old son paint that ball with blue house paint, and he has been adding coats ever since, with his wife Glenda painting it more than eight thousand times herself. In June 2004 Guinness World Records certified it for the most layers in a ball of paint, at 17,994 coats, after a certified arborist named Rick Barker drilled a fourteen inch core, much as he would core a tree, and counted 1,285 coats to the inch under a microscope. By the spring of 2026 the count had passed 29,800. The ball hangs from a steel beam in its own building, which the Carmichaels call the Ball House, and visitors are welcome by appointment at no charge. Each one is handed a roller, chooses a colour, adds a layer and leaves with a certificate recording the number of the coat they applied, so the ball is the work of some tens of thousands of people. A mirror set underneath lets a painter check that the new coat has covered the bottom. About 3,500 came in the best year yet. The ball long ago stopped being round: Carmichael has said he tried for years to keep it so, but the sheer accumulated weight defeated him and it is now lumpy and slightly ovoid. Chips carved from the surface are given away as souvenirs, and the layers show in them like slices of agate.
Getting there
40.2587, -85.7091
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