Wednesday, December 26, 2012

A Christmas Miracle

Remember this?  Remember how Larry demolished a main living area of our home at the beginning of December?  Of course, you do, seeing as how that is almost all I have talked about this month.

Well!  Apparently my spouse works most efficiently when a deadline looms - a serious deadline, a "Hey, honey, I invited ALL the neighbors over to our house for New Year's Day!" sort of deadline.  Because the room?  It is finished.  In fact, by last Saturday, all we needed to do was paint it ("we" as in "Larry," of course).  That is, once we agreed on a paint color, a task that usually takes us several months to accomplish.

So we (as in "Larry") spent all Saturday afternoon running back and forth to the paint store and smearing different colored paint samples on the newly primed den walls.  Larry wanted a blue-green.  I didn't.  Neither of us liked any of the colors we tested anyway.  It was a discouraging experience, on a par with shopping for kitchen stoves at Best Buy. 

There were many cans of paint involved.

At 7 PM, we took a break from testing the newly fragile bonds of our marriage in order to attend an honest-to-goodness holiday cocktail party, held at the home of good friends.  Only, now they are VERY good friends, the BEST of friends, because - after we had entered their house and doffed our coats and poured ourselves some (very stiff) drinks - I walked into their living room to socialize.  "Larry!" I said, dragging him away from the bar to see what I had seen, "Look!  Look at the walls!"

He looked.  "That's it!" he said.

"Yes!" I agreed.

"What are the odds they remember the name of that color?" he asked.

"Not very good, but I'll ask anyway," I said, determined to put an end, once and for all, to our latest home renovation nightmare.  I scouted out our hostess and asked if, by any chance, she knew the name of the paint on her living room walls.  Because, really, that's the proper way to behave at cocktail parties...

"That's easy," she said.  "We just painted it this month.  Homestead Green, by Benjamin Moore."

And right there, folks, was Larry's and my Christmas miracle.  Like the "Gift of the Magi," only with a happy ending....


16 comments:

  1. And people say there's no God???

    Congratulations...

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  2. It's amazing the things we consider a miracle after a certain age...just saying! Congratulations on completing the project.

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  3. I was trying to think of ways to stretch the Gift of the Magi metaphor further but I couldn't.

    I copied my best friend's wall color in my master bedroom. Although I love it I always feel like such a copy-cat. But sometimes you just find a color you click with.

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  4. Ooh! Nothing like the right paint color. Hope you share pictures.

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  5. It's a Christmas Miracle for sure!! Congratulations!! (Bet that was worth putting on panty hose for!)

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  6. Did you burst into the Hallelejuh chorus at that point....or just go get an honest to goodness cocktail? So happy for you. I have the fortune....or misfortune (depending on how you look at it) to be married to someone who doesn't care at all about paint colors or decoration choices. The good part....I can do whatever I want. The bad part....I get to do all the work. Oh well. Glad you found the perfect color....you have a whole 5 days to get it done!

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    1. Oh, it's done already - Larry finished it on Christmas Day. Not even sure I really like the color (looks blue in some lighting and I HATE blue walls), but he cleverly had me over a barrel, as it were, what with the New Year's party coming up.

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  7. Our walls are mostly the same boring white they were went we bought the house 19+years ago. As we gut and rewire, properly insulate and put up drywall, we are painting less boring shades, but still, nothing that dramatic. I did learn my lesson from the girls room. Pick a shad at least 2 lighter than looks good on the samples. The nice pink is pepto bismal pink on a large area.

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    1. Tell me about it! I was aiming for a lovely shade of lavender in one of the girls' rooms several years ago and ended up with black raspberry.

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  8. What a nice New Years' present! I'm going to have to look up the Homestead Green color. Glad you're still married after all that.

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  9. I'm not a fan of blue, either, but I love my sage green bedroom walls. I think Larry is very lucky he got it done!

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  10. Yeah for a finished room! That's fantastic!! I need to repaint my whole house. Not looking forward to that at all.

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  11. Whew! We lived with PINK dining room walls for an entire year before painting them a nice sage green (different name, but that was the color). I'm surprised my boys hadn't staged a revolt before that year was up.

    You know, if you hate it, you can always re-paint when Larry is off on some Boy Scout weekend.

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  12. I am guessing Larry has "use-it-or-lose-it" vacation time that came in handy. Or at least a lot of vacation time "in the bank." In any case, agreement even if momentary (regrets in the response to comments) keeps the marriage going.

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