So this is how I know I'm a writer and not an artist

Task: get big room in basement repainted, so that very dated (60s?) turquoise and sea green stripes on white with deep red trim (yes, honestly) can be hidden, and walls can become bland but fashionable beige.

Task: get front door painted, so that it doesn't look all bashed and (again) dated, but 'pops' (I have to put that in inverted commas - I can't take it seriously as a word. Not quite yet, anyway.)

Method: get friend round, to help me choose paint colours from huge colour chart left by painter (whom, when he told me how long the job would take, and with the knowledge of how long it was going to take the other painter who quoted for me, I described as 'speedy', then looked at his business card in my hand, and saw that his name was Gonzales. You're looking at me blankly. Speedy Gonzales? No? Never mind.)

You have to remember that I really don't care about the colour. I'm not going to be living with it. It just has to sell the house. My friend was a fine art major, and uses words like tone and shade, knowing what they actually mean. She can spend hours choosing between two identical shades of grey, talking of their relative coolness, whereas I mean something entirely different by 'relatively cool'. Nonetheless, she was just the right person for the job, though I feel I unkindly put her through several degrees of agony, by telling her that we had to decide within half an hour (we're being squeezed in between other jobs, so every minute counts). She picked me out a beige for the basement that won't make the grey speckly carpet look dirty (who knew?), and a deep dark purpley colour for the front door, which picks up the brickwork of the house as the realtor had suggested. It was either that, or the terracotta orange that I'd first thought of - terracotta, bricks, whatever - because I'm still so enchanted with my own Italian theme in the dining nook, and terracotta is a word that just springs to my lips before I can say Dulux. Actually, I never like using Dulux, because it sounds too like Durex and I'm afraid I might be in Homebase and say Durex instead of Dulux, and really embarrass myself. In any case, over here it's a question of Behr or Glisson, so the Dulux problem doesn't arise. Though Behr sounds like 'bare' and could therefore be embarrassing too. "Do you recommend painting Behr?" you might ask a Home Depot sales assistant.

Anyhoo... as we had reached our triumphant conclusion, I confessed to my arty friend that I find it hard to pick paint colours because I get distracted by the names. I'd much prefer it if they just gave those little squares numbers, and numbers only. For example, the original brick terracotta that I'd wondered about for the front door was called determined orange. I mean, how can you resist painting a front door determined orange? It has such command, such purpose. To me, it boiled down to a choice between that, and its neighbour robust orange. Would I rather have determined or robust as my message to potential buyers about the house? Meanwhile, the purpley jewel tone that my friend liked (jewel tone, get that?) was called burgundy, which just says dining room to me, and definitely not front door, so I took against that one from the outset.

It's not that I sit pondering these words. It's just that they're so full of instant connotations, all of them, that I have to make a mental effort to screen that out. I confessed to my friend that our downstairs bathroom is painted such a bright yellow because I loved the name bicycle yellow. We didn't delve into why the beige I'd first picked out for the basement (not dark enough, as she pointed out) was breathless.

Conclusion: Sand dollar for the basement, winning after a close battle with lightweight beige, which frankly was never going to come out well in a contest. Cordovan for the front door, after a tussle with river rouge. I don't know what cordovan means, but the moment my friend said she thought it was the name of a Spanish explorer, I fell for it. Exploration... front doors opening onto the world... new beginnings... It's totally perfect. And will make the front door 'pop' from the road, which is what my realtor said.

Meanwhile, we're touching up the stairwell with antique white, which grieves my sensibilities horribly, because dammit, we're trying to give the house an updated feel.

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