Siliconchef by Brian Richardson
This week on “Interior Idol”, Suzan picks the finalists in her paint color contest.
This weekend was supposed to be spent doing all of the “low voltage wiring” in my house (television, alarm, phone, ethernet). But my electrician got delayed on previous jobs (my builder uses the same electrician for all of his houses), so all I ended up doing Saturday was marking box locations. I can’t do any of my wiring until after the electrical wiring & boxes are in place, since my wires will just get in his way.
So I need to take another Friday off, cash in another favor and bribe John (my buddy who runs his own security business) to come back into town, and try to overlap this weekend’s Dragon*Con staff meeting & TechOps gathering with home improvement projects.
So now what? I know, let’s go shopping! Suzan and I liberated a futon from a local store … it’s final resting place will be in the dining room of the new house, temporarily allocated as a library, but it will come in handy when house guests invade my house Friday night. We also got Suzan’s friend Dana, an ex-decorator, to come by and solve our wall color quandry.
Dana looked like Simon on American Idol, tossing paint chips over her shoulder as she winced & grimaced. In an attempt to not look like every new house in town, painted in the famous “rental management white” color, Suzan pulled a rainbow of potential paint chips from the local Ace Hardware. My annoying practicality tells me to paint in a very neutral color, then decorate using knick-knacks & furniture … Suzan wants to experiment with bold colors.
It’s the type of thing divorces are made of.
So Dana and Suzan had a long conversation about colors, how they never look right on a wall, and how paying a painter to make your walls look awful is a poor investment. Dana picked two neutral colors, close relatives of “rental management white”, and suggested we buy furniture we like then repaint the rooms using wash or faux finish treatments.
Dana was ruthless in her admonishment of our lack of color coordination. The color description ranged from “a subtle green that makes me want to puke” to “various shades of mustard accidents”. Now that we have the paint colors out of the way, Suzan and I can start picking out bad countertop colors 
I fear ever encountering Dana! Happily, nobody has gainsaid my desire to have walls that have nothing to do with rental management companies’ preferences in the Castle.
We solved this problem by painting personal rooms different colors and leaving the common areas more neutral colors. We haven’t yet regreted the choices we’ve made. Good luck on the color combos!
It’s often fun to have one room painted a really bold color. Now that the paint colors are somewhat settled, don’t forget to start looking for furniture. If you need to order something special, it may take quite a while.