Picking Colours
It’s time, they tell me, to choose the colours for the house. Once the work is near completion, they’ll bring in a painter to make it all pretty.
I already know that my bedroom, the “library,” and the kitchen/laundry room will stay the colours they are. I chose these colours nine years ago, and I’ve never been sorry. They need a good freshen-up coat, but they are still colours that make me sing.
The kitchen/laundry room is a very pale canary yellow. There’s a hand-painted border at the top of the kitchen wall that is a white background with bright yellow lemons, blue ribbons, and green leaves — that border makes the perfect accent to my pale yellow walls and white cabinets. And I have a cushy floor mat to stand on that matches. My painter friend duplicates the pattern of the mat in the border. I bought about 2 dozen of the mats so that I would always have a nice one to make the kitchen sparkle. And it works!
My bedroom is officially “pink,” but it’s such a pale pink that the only time you can tell is when the sun is setting and the light is shining through the west window. The rest of the time, the walls look white. Because the rest of my room is whites and blues, I wanted a warm white on the walls. It works beautifully.
And the library is a very pale, clear green. Again, it works well to lighten the heaviness of a room that’s only 7×9, with an 8-foot ceiling, and that’s crammed full of bookshelves. Even though most of the bookshelves are white, they are 7 feet tall, so they tend to weigh down the room. The pale green offsets that heaviness and makes the room feel cozy. And it’s the perfect foil to my Chinese-style lithographs and my grandmother’s painting of a magnolia bloom.
So I’m happy with those three rooms. The bathrooms will probably end up white. Boring, I know, but they are so tiny, and I can do a lot if I just have a white canvas to work on. The main bathroom will be white with a hand-painted border of ivy, and the half-bath, which is only 3×5 (honest!), will be white with pale pink flowers and pale green leaves. I already have the accessories chosen for that room, and my friend will just duplicate the floral pattern from them.
The living room, too, may end up white, though I am toying with the idea of an accent wall. I can’t decide whether I want to do a deep green or a deep blue for that wall, but I have a little time, yet.
The boys’ bedroom and playroom will be blue. Very pale, almost icy, but blue. The playroom may have an accent wall of red, since one of the boys is begging me to paint his walls red. If I get a pale enough blue, I think it would work well with the curtains and wallpaper that I already have for that room. If I use the wallpaper. It’s almost too childish for the boys, now. I bought it when they were toddlers, but never had the chance to hang it. My oldest is now 10; he’ll be a teenager before I know it, and he’ll want something grown-up and sophisticated.
I would like a purple room, but my house’s rooms are so small that anything darker than lavender will make them feel like a cave. And I prefer a deep, royal purple.
Anyway, so I got a colour block from our maintenance department today to choose my colours from. (It pays to work for a real estate management firm! We do a couple million dollars worth of business with this paint company every year, so I can use our company’s block to pick my colours and I can buy paint with our company discount. That will sure help the budget, since there are ten rooms and a hall to paint.) You wouldn’t believe how many different colours of “white” there are! Much less the others! It’s going to be a fun few days!