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Our tiny condo of many colors

Thanks Katxena for asking me to write about the apparent pigment obsession in our place.

“Is your ceiling supposed to be pink?”

Our friend Jeffrey, who was painting our place, asked us this soon after starting work in our living room. No, we told him, it wasn’t pink, it was porcelain. True, it looked pink at that moment, but as it dried and the rest of the colors went up it wouldn’t stay pink.

It didn’t. I can’t say how many places Jeffrey has painted in the five years since ours — he’s probably lost count himself — but he says he used more colors for our place than anywhere else. Walk in our door and you see a cinnamon slate hallway (think a subdued but still warm purply-gray). Turn your head and if the door is open, you’ll see our very bermuda blue bedroom (a deep, ocean blue covers not just the walls, but the ceiling too, because I finally managed to convince Lisa that there was little point in painting the bedroom your favorite color if you didn’t see it lying in bed looking up).

The hallway ends and opens up into our living room/kitchen, and the cinnamon slate continues on the wall to your left. Where the door opens to the library, the color changes to gaucho brown (think coffee with cream in it) on the wall in front of you and the wall on your right. Back behind you, the final wall in the room is red river clay (a color a bit darker and redder than wet terra cotta). The porcelain-not-pink ceiling is above you. If you didn’t really look at it, you’d say the ceiling was white — it does look light — but we thought white would look too jarring with so much color, so we chose the lightest color on the top of the paint strip from Benjamin Moore. Porcelain.

See, we were on something of a mission to obliterate white walls.

After years of apartment walls that weren’t actually white, we both wanted color. Not that white would be so bad, if wall were actually white. No, apartment owners always seem to go for this eggshelly, unnatural “natural” sort of white crap color instead. The stuff is too unpleasant to have a proper name. It’s boring. So to get away from it, we spent hours playing with a color wheel, looking at blues and greens and warm browns as well as fun oranges and brighter greens that we ultimately rejected. (Sadly, our bathroom is still waiting for its aqua makeover as underwater tropical paradise. It’s the only room we haven’t painted.)

The library is probably my favorite room. Creekside green (a sage, softer than army green color) is on three walls, and a purple called wild orchid is on the fourth wall. It happens to match a comfy couch (key criteria for buying couch: long enough to fully stretch out on) we already had. The ceiling in this room is titanium, which was the lightest color on the green strip.

I don’t think we talked about it much, but it quickly became clear neither of us wanted wallpaper anywhere. I have nothing against wallpaper. Well, nothing against good wallpaper. Not that I saw much of that growing up. We had some pretty hideous wallpaper. White paper with a diagonal blue ribbon grid and pink rose clusters in the middle of each diamond hideous. Outrageous pink, purple and yellow flowers against white paper which supposedly I chose to match my red-violet like the crayon window shade, though I now find that hard to believe. The kitchen wallpaper was fake old newspapers. Don’t even get me started on the panelling.

In other words, not a lot of paint on the walls. In my grandmother’s dining room (deep red with heraldic designs on the wallpaper) I remember a black bookcase with the insides of the shelves painted bright red. I loved that bookcase. That bookcase is probably why, on the creekside green wall of books, the two small cabinet doors are painted wild orchid purple.