To paint or not to paint. Would I ask the question?
Paint covers a multitude of sins and there had been a lot of indiscretion in this house.
Well, any house inhabited for over half a century has seen its share of drinking, card-playing and fornicating.
No, I wasn’t worried about that kind of dirt. I wanted to wash over scuff marks left from years of the dresser bumping against the wall as mom raced to find her clothes. Marks imprinted after reckless jabs with the vacuum cleaner’s snout in hurried attempts to clean house before husband’s shift ended at the mill.
All I wanted was a funky, fun house and not this 50-year-old rental with squirrels nesting in the attic and a bucket under the kitchen sink to catch dirty dish water that dripped from a hole in the pipe.
At the local mega home improvement store, I looked through the paint chips. Yellow, blue, green. Then I spied a table with paint marked down half price.
Discarded colors that hadn’t matched someone’s dream breakfast nook or Aunt Ida’s hand-hooked rug that was to cover the hardwoods.
Trying to save money, another’s castoffs would be good enough for me.
I spied a couple of cans of salmon-like satin finish and thought: adobe chic.
Just what a house in the rural south needed.
After purchasing the paint, I came home, spread covers over the furniture and rolled a bit of color on the wall.
Hm.
Surely it will look better once more paint is on there.
I rolled and rolled.
Hm.
Surely it will lighten up once it dries.
The more sin I covered, the worse it looked. Brushing that color on the walls was the most heinous crime that room ever experienced.
I only had so much energy, so much time and so much money and this wasn’t turning out at all.
So I kept painting that damned adobe color on the walls, living with that mistake for over a year.
Slept there and worked there and watched Everybody Loves Raymond lying on the bed and thought see, no one has a great-looking house.
Pulling together a hip interior never was your thing Missy. What were you thinking? Adobe chic. The good Lord just sentenced some people to live in houses decorated as if a slide from a brain cell of Jackson Pollock under a microscope was their inspiration.
Over a decade after that paint debacle, pulling together a room is still not my thing.
But I refuse to live with something that is as steel wool rubbing on the back of my neck.
After almost a half century of life I’m finally not afraid to ask the question, what is it that you truly want, Jamie?
Even if the answer means spending another 30 dollars on paint.
