Life Imitating Art

2011-09-20Uncategorized Standard

When we bought our house, we assumed that we’d be keeping the green/blue/gray-ish tinted accent-wall in the living room. It looked like a nice color, that would go well with everything. Then we moved in and it turned out that our sofas and that wall had precious little in common, which was unfortunate, since one of the sofas is up against that wall. Thus began the quest for a better accent-wall color. The following contains a fairly detailed account of what’s happened so far, but it’s necessary to demonstrate the eeriness of what we discovered tonight… Anyway. On with the story!

This color-quest hasn’t been a huge priority, so it wasn’t until ten days ago that I finally made my way to the neighborhood paint-store and bought a couple of sample cans. That evening I posted the following on Facebook:

“Finally went to the paint store to get paint-samples for the living-room wall. Got two samples. One turned out to be the color of the sofas, and the other the color of the kitchen cabinets – and neither were good on the wall. Ended up mixing them 50/50 and kind of like the results. Will sleep on it before deciding.”

What I neglected to say was that I used the combined sample-paints to paint pretty much the entire width of the wall, from the sofa top to as far as I could reach. With that as a reference it quickly became obvious that the color was way too dark.

On my next trip to the store, I therefore got two samples that were much lighter in color. Those got painted on in two big splotches this past weekend, and we got help from visitors who gave us their favorites. One of the lighter colors was a clear favorite, but was too light. I therefore decided to get the next darkness up on my next trip to the paint-store.

Shortly after coming home today, I broke a couple of speeding laws to get to the paint-store before 6pm. I just made it, but I was so late the guy gave me the sample I wanted for free!! I think he just wanted to go home. So home I went and Bjarki and I painted the wall again, starting in between the light patches, and working our way outwards, not quite covering them width-wise.

After Bjarki had gone to bed, I then applied a second coat and decided for the heck of it just to finish off the tiny can of paint. In the process I painted entirely over one of the lighter colors. Then I let the paint dry as I helped Anna with her homework, and put her to bed.

Once I was downstairs again, I started chatting with Finnur about the paint-colors, and remarked “Huh, those colors look quite a bit like the colors of that one actual painting that we have”. As a result I went to the garage to fetch it from a pile of frames hidden behind stuff.

I took the painting, placed it on the sofa and … well, see for yourselves!