Bathroom Project (Part III)

(Continued from Part II)

For those of you who don’t like long posts, you are in luck! The other two I posted today are relatively short – just a few paragraphs and located conveniently just below and just above this one. If the sight of lots of words, though, makes you sad but you are still curious about what this article is about here’s the summary: I painted the bathroom. It is blue. Now you can go – the squirrels aren’t going to chase themselves, after all. Oh, wait. They do… Well, I’m sure you will make yourself useful somehow…

Still on the fence whether you should read on or not? Here’s a little more: The walls were painted three times this week. Call me Mr. “Princess and the Pea”, but I actually feel a little claustrophobic walking into the room now that the already small bathroom is now six paint layers narrower…

Enough summaries. Just read.

My wife is getting herself a gift for Christmas: a court order preventing me from ever again picking colors for the walls of our house. I suppose I could complain but she is totally right. It’s really for my own good and the good of society.

As part of the Bathroom Renovation Project the walls needed to be painted. We were not looking for a drastic change – just something to freshen up the vertical surfaces a bit. That’s all.

I took a piece of old trim that had some of the old color on it to Lowe’s to match it with the Valspar paint cards. Drunk with the power of actually being allowed to make a decision that affects the building where I sleep and store my stuff, I picked a “blue” that was not too different from the paint drip on the trim piece.

I have often read that human eyes are non-linear light sensors and that colors are perceived slightly differently based on biology and sociology. It would be awesome if either of those facts could give me the slightest bit of comfort rather than just take up brain space that could be otherwise used to, say, store a useful skill like matching two colors, just to pick something randomly out of thin air…

The dried paint dot on the can lid perfectly matched the sample card which matched my (in retrospect delusional) preconceptions of how the color should look on the wall. Awesome. Time to go home and paint.

Now would be a good time to interject that anything I say should not be seen as an indictment of Valspar, their paints, or their unexpectedly involved public relations officers. Anyone still hanging in there after eight or so paragraphs should know that any and all negative descriptors used in this article reflect solely on me and my painting skills. The cans of interior latex house paint and the company that makes them are completely innocent.

“Hmm… that sure is… blue…” I thought, opening the can. “Maybe it will look a lot different on the wall after it dries and darkens a bit.”

Umm, no. Not really. I mean, it’s good quality paint, but it is not, like, magical or anything. There are probably places that this shade of blue looks good in but my hall bathroom is not one of them.

How to describe the color… Hmm… Well, although the hue did not match any of the other blue accents in the room like the shower curtain or the picture frames, it perfectly matched the extruded plastic insert in my son’s port-a-potty. The color reminded me of the startling blue arc flash you briefly see when the filament in an incandescent light bulb suddenly pops. I suppose if a bunch of bank robbers ran in, taped up and tarped the bathroom really carefully, then simultaneously opened their loot bags with the explosive blue dye canisters in them, you would get an idea of what it looked like.

My wife called it “Carnival Blue” – a phrase that somehow boils the above paragraph down into just two words without minimizing the off-putting nature of how it felt to be surrounded by the color.

As much as I didn’t want to redo the room, the color had to go.

So, rather than entering the bathroom in the little-known Better Homes and Gardens contest for “Least Relaxing Place in Which to Evacuate Your Bowels” I decided to repaint it. Obviously, I wasn’t allowed to pick the paint by myself this time - my wife took my hand and gently led me to the color cards that did not induce vomiting or retinal bleeding.

But I stood up for myself and I got to pick the texture. Victory, thy name is Eggshell…

It took two coats of “Kinda North Carolina Tar Heels” blue to cover the “Chinese Knockoff Duke Blue Devils” blue, but it is done. The lights, paintings, switch covers and mirror are all back up. All that remains now is reconditioning and installation the baseboards, adding trim and moulding, installing the new shower head, cutting and re-mounting the closet door, changing out the towel racks, changing doorknobs and hinges, re-painting the heater vent, and adding stone tiles above the tub.

Pfft. It’s practically like I’m on vacation!

(To be continued…)