First Person Singular by Wendy Braitman

filed in Daily Life

How To Paint a Room When You’re Single

June 3, 2009 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

I  needed to paint my bathroom. Let me start this again. I needed someone else to paint my bathroom, because I am lousy with a brush and roller (you can see every stroke) which is why I never give myself a manicure, plus I hate standing on ladders. What I needed to do was choose the right color.

At least ten different times, I drove to a little paint store on Pico Boulevard. Hispanic painters frequent this store and are taken care of by an Hispanic sales staff. In all my visits, I was the only white person and the only girl, and the only one who had no idea what she was doing. I would stand edged in a corner at the paint chip stand, where the lighting was absurdly dim. Each time I considered a color, I had to lift it out of its slot and bring it to the door where the natural light came through. I took home about one hundred paint chips, not all at once, but slowly over weeks. I did so, furtively, because I couldn’t bare the workers noticing me sticking so many chips in my purse. I imagined them laughing at me in the back room, because I couldn’t settle on a color, and by association, they would know I couldn’t settle on a mate.    

One weekend, I dragged a friend to the store. He’s good with interiors. It was because of him that we tested the ambers and the vanillas, which turned out all wrong with the flesh-colored tiles in my bathroom. I asked another designer, who teaches at LA’s most prestigious art school to help, and his suggestions also came up short. I discussed my wall color with as many experts as I could muster, who didn’t require a fee. For a month, at least, I had seven or eight different squares of test colors on my wall.

And then, an architect pal, who had driven from San Francisco to visit one weekend, remembered he had a Pantone fandeck in the trunk of his car, and he let me keep it. I could stand in my bathroom, fanning out the array of colors, and at my own pace, decide what to paint in peace.

I went with the white.

(Photo by LulaLouise)

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