It Once Was Green

      It once was green.  Now it is peach. 

 

     And egg shell.

      Some of it was green, then peach, and then egg shell.

 

     One of the Munsters (was it Lurch?) showed up above the stairwell.

 

     That is as close as I’ll ever come to drawing a portrait.  It happened because I had to stand the ladder on a stair step and lean it against the wall to get to the peak high above the bottom of the stairway.  I painted a bit below the ladder top on either side.  The Munster revealed himself when I took the ladder away.

      When we were first looking at this house, both girls looked at the green walls in the kitchen-family room and said,” Mom isn’t going to like that.”  Of course, they were right.

     The color change has been under consideration for some time.  A year ago, we were putting on a new roof.  This year’s project was covering up the green monster.  No more will our northwest wall be confused with Fenway’s left field wall.

      The project wasn’t without travail.  The first attempt proved too light, almost white.  Can’t have that.  Back to Home Depot, where the lady darkened it to peach color.  That worked for a while, until we ran out.

     The second gallon turned out a little lighter than the first.  By the end of the first gallon, I had both west walls done and most of the stairwell.  You could see a line between the two gallons.  I repainted a few square feet when the word came down, “Since we have to repaint it. . . .”  Time for a color change.

     This time “we” tried to match the southern kitchen walls.  The Goodwife took a switch plate cover from the south wall and went through the color samples for thirty or forty minutes trying to match colors, without success.  Finally, one of the paint people told her they had this machine which would tell her everything she wanted to know about the paint on that switch plate cover. 

      It turned out to be eggshell.  At my suggestion, she got a small one-cup sample to try on our still-green wall.  At first, it looked too light.  After agonizing in the afternoon sunlight, she finally decided it was a close enough match, in the artificial light.

     Back to Home Depot for a gallon of the stuff.  Soon the last green wall was covered and the now-peach stairwell turned to eggshell.  There remains the touchup to do.  That means putting up the “scaffold”, a 2 X 12 between a stepladder on the landing and a ladder standing on a stair step and leaning against the wall, again.

     Touchup, replace switch plate and outlet covers, reinstall stair handrail and this project will be done.  Well, there is the green curtain for the kitchen window, now no longer usable.