Thanks to everyone's thoughts on sheet-pan storage, I realized that the 18 inch cabinet to the right of my stove would make a perfect dedicated cabinet for both sheet pans and platters, and my cabinet guy came up with a design that will give me four four-inch vertical dividers and one shallow shelf on top for small racks (I have a collection of ovals and small rectangles for roasters and quarter sheet pans that I use quite a bit). Problem solved!
Meanwhile, for the last two weeks I've been trying to choose a paint color. I got a bit of a reprieve when Painter A put me off for a week, and then two more days, and then two more days after that and then emailed me last Wednesday in a fit of total situational unawareness that, so sad, he'd taken a job running crews for someone else but I could hire him through his new boss. Right. Like I would let his flakey white butt anywhere near my house again.
Nobody told me that choosing paint colors was a torture test unlike any other. I mean, after getting near ulcers over the flooring (Philipine merbau in 5" planks and Raja multi-color slate) and cabinet wood (birds eye maple, with a caramelly golden oak stain), finding the right shade of white should be a walk in the park.
Well, not in JeniseWorld. The first task was to go to Kelly Moore paints and pick up white paint color chips. Last time I did that there were about 15 shades of white. Now there are about 1800. I filled my purse and spent a week poring over them, finally picking out the five likeliest colors to try. Bob and I then painted all five on a northfacing wall in the laundry room. The wall had been texture coated but not yet primed. We immediately ruled out three but thought two were contenders. Then we got distracted by another emergency and in the meantime the texture guys came back and primed the laundry room wall, so our work was gone and the cans had been moved so we didn't know which was which. We decided that wasn't a good wall anyway so we now painted the five on a southfacing wall in the entry way directly under a skylight.
Wow, those are white? One was, but one was peach, another was brown, another was mustard, and two were maybe good. But to find out, we then painted them on an east-facing wall. Geez, those are the same colors? If I hadn't gotten them out of the same cans myself I wouldn't have believed it. So we then took the two most likely candidates from that batch and painted a pony wall half of each color. When it dried, we couldn't tell them apart. Couldn't even see a line where one stopped and the other started. And they both looked plain, antiseptic white. So we decided we were being blinded by the white-white of the primer and decided to have a go at a wall in our apartment-nee-bedroom, where we have been living for the last three months with five angry cats, that is still the old yellow-gray shade of beige that every room in this house was (I'm into continuity) that we've now decided is too dull and dark, and put the five colors there.
They were the ugliest whites I've ever seen in my life. Each and every one of them, all wrong. So I went back to my chips and then placed a frantic call to Kelly Moore demanding to know how I, if I decide I like OW-335-1 but want it one shade yellower, say, can figure that out from the numbering system. Surely there was some logic to the system that would lead me out of the desert. The answer was worse than I thought: the whites are completely random. The presence of one color on a strip does not imply anything about its relationship to the others.
F word! So I ordered five more colors, going a litte deeper in color than I had on the first pass and we painted those on the bedroom wall. More confusion: one was too gray, another looked lavender, one was too yellow, one was decidedly too white and yet another was a color you might name Public Toilet. Back to Kelly Moore for three more. And they weren't right either, so we started mixing paints, thinking that it would be easier--and we had enough paint--to correct the faults and create a custom blend that would suit. And voila, we got a color. A 50/50 blend of OW250 and OW255 was attractive on every wall be that morning, noon or night.
So yesterday morning I showed up at Kelly Moore and had them mix up a gallon. An hour later I met Jesus, my new painter, back here at the house and had him paint the den wall on a bright sunny day with it.
EGADS, it was way too dark. Looked like egg nog with extra yolks. So I sent Jesus home with instructions to come back this morning: I would have paint, I promised. I would force myself to choose something. So I got out all the cans of paint I now own and painted swatches of the unpainted half of the den wall with everything I've accumulated over the last few weeks, pulled out a chair, and sat down to stare at the wall.
And could decide nothing.
So I called my friend Susan who lives on the bluff above me and begged her to come down and give me her opinion. I created a nice little tableau in front of the wall with flooring samples, a strip of maple with various stain options on it, and the gray and caramel cement-fiber shingles we're using outside to represent the stone colors of the ginormous rock fireplace that divides the entire downstairs. So we spent 59 minutes debating the suitability of just two of the colors which we zeroed in on almost immediately, and then realized that one of the smaller swatches that we hadn't paid any attention to was probably perfect. It was whiter but not too bright or too-anything else. And it wasn't even one of our custom mixes, it had its own number and could be ordered from the catalog, as it were. And the egg nog color got more beautiful as it dried, and we finally decided that we'd complete the den wall with it, and use it as an accent color on two other walls. For me, who is very conservative about color, this is pretty darned daring.
When Bob got home he agreed with all the choices and we had a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Yes, it was a good day, a decision had been made, and it felt right. Right?
Wrong. I woke up at 3 a.m. sweating, feeling like I was on the edge of a precipice and someone was yelling Jump! Jump! What was the name of my new color? Was it Dubai Sand? Was it Buff Bluff? Did I even buy Buff Bluff? I wanted ivory. I wanted a linen-like color, soft and naturally not-quite-white. Swiss Coffee and White Chip had already been eliminated as too white and too pink, but Almond Sugar would be too yellow and English Sycamore too brown. Didn't I get a color called Ivory Tunnel? Didn't I tell Bob that if I were going to pick any color by the chip, that was the one I'd choose? Was that the one I picked? I didn't know, I knew it only as OW221-1. By 4 a.m. I was out of bed and in here posting away to kill time while pensively waiting out the next excruciating hour until Bob's alarm went off, when I could get back into our room and find the paint chips, and wondering at what point it would not be too early to call Jesus and tell him not to come.
The alarm went off. Two minutes later I held the chip for OW221-1 in my hand: Ivory Turret. It IS the right color. At 7:00 I phoned in my order to the guys at the paint store who have seen so much of me all I have to do is say "Hi, this is Jenise," and the tres amigos are downstairs right now getting ready to paint.
And so all's well, right? Well, not quite. In preparation for the arrival of the painters, I had my contractors pull the remaining carpet away from the wall in my office area, and we found soft wall board and mold at the base of one of the only walls we haven't replaced.
The nightmare's not over.
"
