Friday, March 28, 2008

True Colors

The other day, an unfamiliar car pulled into my driveway. I thought the man who got out and walked to the door must have been lost and was coming to the wrong house.

"I don't mean to be disrespectful, ma'am," he told me when I answered the door, "but I've been doing some painting work down the street and..."

"And you noticed my horrible paint job?" I asked.

I took the man's card. He was very sweet. And very right. My house looks like a carnival horror house with peeling paint and spider webs and half the American population of mud daubers. It seriously needs a paint job.

But choosing colors to paint the outside of your house is HUGE. What if it looks horrible? You can't afford to paint twice. And I am completely incapable of accurately imagining the end results. And color blind.

Conversation with my mother over paint chips, one of which was destined to become my kitchen wall color:

Mom: See here, the floor tile you used, the green in it is more of a blue/cool tone and these paint chips have a yellow/warm tone to them. You can't use any of them.

Me: Huh?

Mom, snatching a couple paint chips out of the approximately ten trillion green ones on display: Use this one for the kitchen, that one is too light and won't effectively pick up the green tone in the flooring. You'll need to use this one in the TV room, it is one shade darker and will carry the green tone over from the kitchen floor to the flooring you have in the TV room, but you'll need to get a rug with the darker green tones to balance out the yellow/warm tones in the hardwood flooring that are in conflict with the cool green tones in the kitchen. If you use this darker color and get a rug with perhaps this color scheme (throws about 20 colors on the table) it will eliminate the difference between the two floors.

Me: Uh, okay. (wipes drool from chin)

What do I most frequently ask my mother? "Does this go?"

It's why I only wear jeans or black. Everything goes.

And on a completely unrelated note:

Loki joins the zombie craze sweeping the nation and attempts to eat his brother's brains.

2 comments:

Marcheline said...

My only advice for you regarding paint chips and house color is this: When you find the paint chip that looks exactly like the color you want, pick a paint that's three or four shades lighter than that.

Color on a small chip is processed differently by the brain than when there's a house-sized thing that's the same color. The larger the thing is that you're gonna paint, the fainter you need the color to be.

Good luck!

- M

Marcheline said...

That second paragraph was so poorly written, I'm embarrassed to own it. I hope you understand what I was trying to say. Honestly, it looks like I was sniffing paint instead of talking about it. Jeepers.