The incredibly brown room

Have I ever shown you my incredibly brown room? This is the room I blog in. My dog and I spend a lot of time in here. It’s the brownest, ugliest, unfriendliest room in my house. A teenager used to live in here: I’m sure it was an ideal backdrop for teen angst. If I wanted to write dark, self-indulgent, soul-spewing poetry, this might work. But I don’t. So I’m going to paint the incredibly brown room.

The only thing I like about the incredibly brown room is that this mask looks kind of cool against a brown background: my son made it for me when he was a weird little kid.

Being a typical Libran (not that I believe in such things), I have difficulty making decisions. Do you know how many colours there are? There are trillions. There are billions of greens, billions of yellows, billions of every single colour, even white. A single strip of green paint chips contains: Meadow Mist, North Woods, Windsurfer, Leapfrog, Lime Freckle and Irish Acres. This is just one of a thousand strips of green paint chips. And each subtle variation of each shade of each colour CHANGES constantly, depending on the time of day and the colours around it and the size of the space it occupies.

Apart from having too many choices, I know I get swayed by the names of the colour. I look at a strip of colours and I like the Jamaican Aqua best, but I want to choose the Tropicana Cabana because I like saying it. Go ahead, say it out loud…Tropicana Cabana…now don’t you feel like picking up a paint brush and enveloping your room in Tropicana Cabana? (My ideal job, by the way, would be Colour Namer. It’s creative, it’s poetic, and I could cross thousands of tasks off my To-Do list each day.)

I had a bedroom once that I painted three times in one week. First a yellow that was too citric once it was on the walls. Then a purple that might have worked in a sun-filled room, but this was not a sun-filled room. And finally a lighter purple that I didn’t love but could live with. (Unfortunately we then painted the entire workplace a depressing shade of purple, and ruined purple for all time for every employee who ever worked there.)

Anyway, back to the apartment. In that same apartment I painted the living room a gorgeous deep yellow that was was warm and cozy in the evenings and absolutely sizzled in the sunshine. I loved it so much I painted the dining room the same colour a few weeks later, and then the kitchen. Suddenly it was too much of a good thing. But I lived with it for six more years.

I think I want to paint the incredibly brown room two different colours: two walls will be blue-green and two walls will be yellow. But which blue-green and which yellow? And which walls will be which? I shouldn’t obsess so much over getting it right: no matter how disastrous my choices, it’s almost certainly going to be a phenomenal improvement. My problem is I don’t just want to improve it: I want to love it.

Over the past two days I’ve spent a lot of time at these two sites: www.behr.com and www.sherwinwilliams.com. They each have an online tool for virtually painting rooms. You pick a room from their selection of rooms, and then you click on different colours to paint them. It’s a cool tool, but they only have grand designer rooms with huge windows and vaulted ceilings and architectural details and fireplaces and expensive furniture. They don’t have any plain boxy little rooms with a single small window and ugly but functional furniture. Normal rooms, ya know? It makes a difference.