Our color quagmire

My wife Karen and I are finally wrapping up work on a two-story addition to our Natick fixer-upper.

We’ve been pretty darn lucky. No major budget overruns and everything just about wrapped up a year after we began serious planning.

But, ironically, one of the toughest things we have faced is picking out the colors for the new half of our old house – two new bedrooms, an office, a new kitchen, a second bathroom and a small family room.

We painted the office and first bedroom on our own, picking, without much problem, light green and a deep blue respectively.

Then help arrived, in the form of a friend who runs his own painting shop. He’s providing the labor to finish up the remaining rooms - all we have to do is pick out the colors.
What could be easier, right?

Wrong. We picked an reddish orange for what will be our master bedroom, but settling on a color for our new kitchen/family room has been entertaining, to say the least.

We thought we had settled on a color, a light shade of purple. Once it got on the wall, it looked like a day-glow shade of lavender you might find on an old set of Miami Vice.

Just call it our color quagmire.

First a little background. Karen and I are big color fans. When we bought our then creaky, run-down, late 19th century village colonial, the walls were covered with dingy wallpaper, yellowish and brown from years of nicotine stains.

We stripped layer after layer of hideous wallpaper and then began painting. Each room got a different color. Picking was fun. Navajo pony, a mild shade of orange, was one of my favorites – being an English major, I always look at the somewhat ridiculous paint names. Things flowed.

And so it was when we began painting the first few rooms of the new addition – that is until professional help arrived.

Don’t get me wrong, it has been great to have the help. But suddenly the nice rhythm we had going, looking at colors, talking them over, not taking things too seriously, vanished.

We had a pro observing our choices – and a time line to meet.

The good news is our painter friend has seen it all before. After it became clear our second choice for the living room/kitchen, a reddish pink, was already generating second guessing, he wisely told us to take our time and get back to him when we were sure.

As I write this, my wife has settled on a shade of purple/grey called Carolina plum. We dabbed some on the wall the other night, looked at it again in the morning light, and, so far, no regrets.

I’m OK with it. My theory now is the more you think and look at a particular color, the more complicated it becomes. You can talk yourself out of anything, really.

So let the paint roll.