We are repainting the house next week. And by “we,” I mean a professional painter has been hired to paint the house and I will be standing outside asking questions and offering advice while pretending that I am actually helping the process along, rather than actively hampering it.
The decision to paint the house was an easy one. Selecting what colors to use was significantly harder. For some reason, my wife and I seem completely unable to come to a consensus. Initially, we both just started suggesting colors that we liked. We quickly discovered that we have drastically different ideas of what appropriate colors for a house should be. My wife suggested yellow or green. I advised that I would rather the house not look like it belonged in a row of buildings in a Norwegian fishing village. As an alternative, I suggested red. My wife agreed that red is a lovely color – if you are a cow – but she herself was not prepared to live in a barn for the next ten years.
Stalemate.
After much discussion, we found that there were only two things that we agreed on. One, we both did not want a color that was so bland and neutral that birds would fly into the sides of the house because they didn’t notice that it was in the way. And, two, we did not want something so bright and offensive to the eyes that the neighbors would wander into the yard because they thought the circus had just come to town. That wasn’t much to work with, but at least it was a starting point.
We ended up going to a paint store to browse and do some brainstorming. The plan was to peruse the store’s “color wall” and eliminate the hues that made either of us want to claw our eyes out of our heads or dry heave in an abandoned corner of the store. Gradually we would, we hoped, find ourselves with a few possible choices that we both could agree upon.
It worked. Sort of.
We discovered that we both liked a small assortment of colors in the spectrum of blue to gray. This was progress, but we weren’t out of the woods yet. Now, we needed to agree upon the exact shading of blue and gray. Do we want more blue than gray? Or should we go with a color that was more gray than blue? I found myself saying things like, “I think we should pick a color that has enough blue in it that when you look at it, you know that it’s blue, but you don’t say to yourself, wow, that’s really blue!”
And my wife would nod her head as if I was still speaking English and was making perfect sense, even though I sounded to myself like an art critic trying to decide if he liked a Jackson Pollock painting.
We finally narrowed the selection down to two potential winners. My wife began to discuss the pros and cons of each choice when I suddenly discovered that I had completely lost interest in the whole project. One moment, I’m engaged and alert, and the next I’m staring at the floor, unable to focus on anything other than what kind of leftovers I might find in the refrigerator when I got home. The needle on the gauge to my male tank of tolerance for home design projects had firmly landed on “E.” I found my brain cluttered with thoughts like, “I’m going to spend most of my time inside the house, so what the hell do I care what the outside looks like?” And, “Why do we need new paint, anyway? The cracks in the old paint give the place character.”
My growing apathy must have been noticeable, because it was at this point that an employee of the shop decided it was time to intervene. He offered to mix up two quarts of paint, one of each color we were considering, so we could take them home and paint sections of the house to get a better idea of how they would look on the entire exterior of the home. I recommended that he should go back behind the counter and mind his own damned business, but my wife diplomatically reminded me that selling paint was his business, and I should probably just shut up and let the poor guy do his job.
We drove home with my wife cradling two small buckets of paint in her lap.
And that is pretty much where we are today. The house has two large blotches of blue paint on one side, and I honestly can no longer tell the two shades apart. The bad news is that we still have not decided on which color to go with, and the painters show up next week. The good news is that I no longer care. I might just tell them to use both colors in an elaborate pattern of stripes and swirls. They can even add a few black patches and make polka dots if they like.
Why not? I don’t have to look at it.
I will just sit on the couch in the living room and answer angry phone calls from the neighbors.
I guess the circus is coming to town, after all.