It's late on a Saturday night (well, late for 38-year olds), and Jack the Psychotabby is nosing around in the sun room, until recently filled with greenery but now entirely empty. Our living room, meanwhile, is in a state of...something. Let's call it mid-spring cleaning. And the dining room can safely no longer be called such. We can call it...our room full o' stuff. Yes, the apartment's been painted.
After a couple of years of furtively picking up paint swatches at any hardware store we happened to be passing, discussing what colors we want where, giving up in annoyance when we couldn't come up with a color scheme we agreed on, we finally got the job done.
Not all of it, mind you. Only half of the apartment was repainted: the living room, and sun room, and the entrance half of the hallway. The bedroom and office got drywall cracks patched over, but that was it. Our landlord offered to split the costs with us, as long as we didn't go crazy with the paint colors. (So much for my plaid bathroom.)
We stuck with white for the hallway and sun room, but we actually agreed to a color in the living room. A few weeks back, we were flipping through this six-zillion color paint wheel lent to us by the painter, and we reached our typical lack of consensus. Tori would pick a color which I'd immediately reject, like nuclear taupe, while I'd pick a color, like neon wino vomit, and she would toss me her "you have GOT to be kidding" look. Normally this would lead to my giving up in disgust, telling her to pick whatever she wanted, then I'd retreat into the bedroom and lay down with my iPod. This time, however, I came upon a great idea.
"Sweetheart," I said, "Instead of picking from six zillion colors, let's pick a basic color and then work from that color family only. That way, we'll whittle our way down to only six thousand colors, and that's gotta be easier, right?" Right. We decided to work only within yellow, and incredibly, we decided upon a color within five minutes. The color? You're not going to believe this: it's called "light yellow." Yes! In a housepaint world where colors are typically named by stoned Benjamin Moore employees reading the excrement emitted by squirrels fed the Oxford dictionary ("what about 'sandpiper liver?'" "Sounds great! How about "dunghill ketchup?") there's still room in America for "light yellow." (You think that's wonderful? We actually has the option of "yellow!" It still exists! Given, we'd all go blind from the color if surrounded by it in our living room, but still...yellow! Wow!)
And now it's all painted, and you know what? The light yellow works. It's got a creamy look to it, bright but not obnoxiously so, and we kept the trim and the mantle white, so one doesn't drown in yellow when they enter the room. Now all Tori and I need to do is agree how to rearrange the living room. I've already told her she can do whatever she wants. I need an iPod break.
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