Red, White & Beige




OK, I admit it. I am hooked on HGTV. That’s House and Garden Television for those of you who watch Masterpiece Theatre and don’t have cable shows like Decorating on a Dime. Add Color! and Divine Design are my guilty pleasure. Watching a team of experts come into a house and, in a tidy half-hour episode, transform a hovel like mine into a house that looks like nobody lives there – well, that’s my idea of entertainment.

Of course I don’t want my house to look like nobody lives here, I just want it to look like we don’t live here. Heck, I’d even settle for having one room that doesn’t look like it was decorated by Fisher-Price™ and a pair of wild raccoons. With that vision, I decided to redo our dining room.

 


On TV, the decorators usually start the transformation by painting the walls a warm, rich color. Paint, they say, is the fastest way to change the look of a room – but then, they’ve never met my kids. In just a few years, our walls have acquired a grimy patina of dirty hand prints, greasy fingerprints and a few inexplicable footprints near the ceiling. Underneath, is a meek shade called “White Coffee.” OK, it’s beige. My whole house is beige. Beige is safe. Beige is neutral. Beige goes with everything, even  greasy fingerprints and  wild raccoons.



But, inspired by HGTV and armed with confidence, courtesy of the Home Depot (“You can do it, we can help”) commercials, I was determined to break out of my flesh-toned rut and into the realm of color. So on Saturday morning, when my husband went on his weekly pilgrimage to the hardware store, I went too, in search of  the perfect pigment.



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