Oh paint, how I love thee. And how I loathe thee!
I feel as if I’ve been painting the back bedroom for most of my life. I should explain something about this house. Nearly all the walls are blue: every room and the hall and the loo, though the kitchen is pale green.
Normally, I’d only have blue in the bathroom, because it’s the closest I get to being a mariner. But somebody in this house before me must have really liked the colour, which some think cold and some think calming. I guess these folk liked it for the latter reason.
The back bedroom, which I hope to turn into a study, feels cool and calm, but it’s also very dark because the garden at the back is full of tall trees on a slope. So I invested in brilliant white paint.
I should have invested this study project with more urgency, as I’ve now spent nearly two years writing with my laptop on my, er, lap, rather than sitting at a proper desk, feeling organised and efficient.
But, after weeks and weeks, I’m still stuck on wall four. The problem is that the room is full of big bookcases, not to mention a weights bench and a guitar rack. There’s nowhere else to put these things in this little house, so I’ve had to clear space in front of one wall at a time.
And I’ve had to coat each wall four times. Maybe I should have tried to take the previous colour off first, but I’m far too busy to faff about with sandpaper or whatever, and just breenged in willy-nilly.
The work has gone on forever. Still, I think it’s made the room the teeniest bit lighter. But, now, there are all the other walls in the house to consider. I could be at this for the rest of my life. Indeed, the ootside of the hoose could do with painting too.
Other people would have done all this as soon as they moved in. My friends would also have knocked down walls, turning cupboards into lavatories and lavatories into bedrooms. But I tend just to accept things as they are.
One wee change I did make to the blue-walled main bedroom was to put a border decoration round the top of the walls, and the effect was fantastic. I did this before, with blue on yellow, in the dining room of my last house.
This time, I did a darker blue on the lighter blue, and it worked a treat. It’s amazing what these little border rolls of wallpaper can do. On Amazon, unfortunately, they come from China, and so take an age to arrive. Then you learn that you should have ordered two because there isn’t enough for a whole room.
But you persevere and get there in the end. I’ll just have to keep on keeping on with the painting, a little bit here and there, as time for the busy daydreamer allows.
Then, when it’s all done, it’ll be time to move again. New walls to paint, more months meditatively working the rollers and brushes, with paint in my hair, and paint on my shoes, and paint on the floor, and the odd splash or two on the patiently waiting walls.
