When Walls DO Talk

When we bought That Old House in the Spring of 2008, 
I had two days to choose the colors for the rooms.

Me and the Benjamin Moore fan decks got quite intimate.

It is so hard to make these decisions in a hurry.

I had a little guidance from some of the rooms themselves;
they had strong opinions about their colors.

Stick with me for this story . . . there is a point, I promise!

I tried hard to get the dining room to agree to be yellow,

even painting big patches of yellow on the walls,

but it insisted that it needed to be red.

And so it was.  And still is.

You shouldn't argue with these things.

The little upstairs guest room was clearly done with lavender,

and it became yellow.  

Because it said so.  It had to be.

And the upstairs hall bath?

As we found it.

It insisted on being Blue.

But not any old blue; it had to be just the right blue.

And I found it in the fan deck for Moore's Historic Colors.

Wythe Blue.

I adore this color.  If I ever need to paint myself, this is the color I'll use.

And so we come to last week, when the bathtub was replaced.

Down came the tub walls,
revealing old, old, old, very old wallpaper.

The wallpaper was blue.

But not any old blue; it was Wythe Blue.

Even my artist daughter Anne said, "That's the same blue!"

It's a little weird, what with all the other kinds of unexplained
things that happen around That Old House, that this room
should so clearly have spoken to me about its color.

As did the dining room, the yellow guest room,
the master bedroom, and the exterior of the house.

We bought an old yellow house
that I always pictured, in my mind's eye, as white.

Yellow house, green shutters.

Two years ago, when painters were scraping it, we discovered
that the bottom coat of paint, the original color, was indeed white.
And now it is again.


Back to its original white, and its original
ultra-dark green shutters and door trim.
Yup, that's green, not black!


I wouldn't call the past colors secrets of an old house,
but I do love getting a peek behind the walls of our old house.

Have a lovely Tuesday.

We are in for wonderful September-like weather this week.

Hooray!  -- Cass