painting, chapter 288

I overestimated my ability to be okay with a quick color choice. I grabbed a nice shade of robin's egg blue for the bedroom, got it home, and as I put the first stroke on the wall I gasped. It was swimming pool turquoise. Now, I have a pretty well developed denial system, and ignored what I knew: I could never live in a house with a turquoise bedroom. A dark, swimming pool turquoise bedroom. I couldn't sleep let alone accessorize. So I painted the entire room telling myself over and over again: it'll be fine when it dries. Maybe the laws of physics won't apply and it will dry lighter instead of darker -- I can never remember how that goes -- inside paint dries darker, outside paint lighter. I forget. The point, however, is that it dried darker. Way freakin' darker. Turquoise like some old lady's knit pants. And when I say I painted the room, well, that's only half true. My husband, who ordinarily lets me do all the painting, helped. And liked the color. And said as much. So now, I have to overcome all sorts of misgivings as I meander inevitably toward what you all know is a foregone conclusion: I will buy more paint. I will paint the room again. We will sleep in the living room one more night. At least. And this is the only reason my honey got involved, I think. He wanted to get the room back together. So, three nights later, I'm still painting.

I went back to Home Despot and bought more robin's egg blue paint. This time, I had my swatch with me and took my sweet time, and got what I wanted in the first place. The moral of the story (or "the take home message" as they say in work conferences) is: you can't rush art. Or me.

So I brought home a gallon of Swan Sea and a quart of Aqua Breeze for the accent wall. Gotta have an accent wall. I rolled the walls, three of the four are just drywall and take paint easily. The fourth is a little more complicated: a panelled wall covered with stucco, primered, with one coat of dark turquoise paint. Almost black. I'm exaggerating now.

So I slap on the paint, and on the difficult wall, the paint begins to sag, actually to start slipping down the wall, stretch-marks in the wake of the landslide. I panic, try to drag it back up with a brush, it does not go well. I wait for it to dry, repaint it, and when all is said and done, it is fine, but a damn good think it was supposed to look distressed because it does.

I have to go now. Must paint the baseboards. No rest for the wicked.