Thursday, January 31, 2008

Gingerdread

I can't take credit for that title; it's John's. Might be my favorite title on the whole blog, though, since it encloses in one word the spreading horror I feel this morning at what happened last night. No, nothing burned down, nobody was injured, nothing remotely permanent went wrong. But a dream was lost, my friends.

The dream was that we'd get done tonight. By done, I mean not (of course) truly finished, but done in a way that would let us take a break in February—which, as you might know, begins tomorrow. We have all the hard stuff done. We wanted to get our dining/living rooms painted this week and then draw the line in the sand. To that end, we chose a paint color Tuesday night ("Gingerbread") and bought the paint yesterday, thinking that by tonight we could put a second coat on, pop some champagne and come up with something appropriate to say to mark the occasion. All was going according to plan, except:

This color is so freaking ugly.

It's orange. Orange! Why did we paint half our house orange? What happened in our brains to make us choose this? Not just one brain, mind you. We both thought it would work. I was deluded into thinking we had chosen some nice shade of brown. (Perhaps because gingerbread is brown? Yes, I like that explanation. It allows me to blame the person who named the paint color.) The white trim is popping out like crazy—imagine you're in the day-care room in the mall, near the restrooms, where parents park their leaky-nosed children in the care of unqualified teenagers while they go shopping for tennis bracelets or Shih Tzu calendars. That's what the orange and white is like. And the subtle colors of the beams and ceiling are getting way overwhelmed. I feel like a sophomore design major whose project was just given an F by a professor I have a crush on.

There are a lot worse problems in the world than the color of our walls. But for some reason I'm feeling a major amount of embarrassment over this. We're not sure what to do. I don't think we'll bother with the second coat tonight; we could just paint it white and start over.

On the way into work this morning, as I was gnashing my teeth about this and John was trying in vain to comfort me, we noticed that we were behind a True Value semi-truck with this printed on the back: "Follow me to your perfect paint color."

- Erika




1 comment:

zoe krylova said...

this probably is of no comfort if you've already made up your mind, but i think it looks pretty sweet! can you live with it for a week (while relaxing and taking a break from it all) and see how you feel about it next weekend?