death by paint

I fear that my mother is going to have a heart attack very soon. And I blame this all on Trading Spaces. Before this show hit the airwaves, people tended to be satisfied with their living spaces. Bean bag chairs? A great accessory! Electric blue shag rugs? Wonderful for that intimate evening at home! But now, because of Paige Davis and her posse of designers, we have been told that those things are bad. Very bad, indeed.

They have taught us other things as well. Like how the color white should never be on your walls. You need spice! Excitement! Something that speaks toward your personality, like mauve, or coral. And ceiling fans are a definite no-no. They’re tacky and don’t go with anything. And if there’s one thing that we’ve learned, it’s that having an un-tacky room is worth its price in sweat…the very same sweat that will be seeping out of every pore because your ceiling fan is gone.

So Trading Spaces has had my mother running around the house, declaring every room unlivable. Rooms that used to be fine, are now inadequate. And as the designers preach each weekday at 4:00, the easiest solution is to revitalize your room through paint.

The room that is currently under attack in my parent’s house is the master bedroom. Which, two weeks ago, became green. The problem was, however, that my mother didn’t realize just how green a green room would be.

“You know, this color looked beautiful on that little two inch square they gave me at Home Depot, but on the walls it’s the same color that my grandmother’s kitchen was back in the fifties!” my mom exclaimed. So in an attempt to lessen the greenness of the room, she tried sponge painting a grayish color over it, which she informed us was ‘chocolate frost’, though I feel that this was just a fancy name for ‘gray’.

The result looked like something that belonged on the set of M.A.S.H. “Well, this just won’t do,” mom said, and off she went, back to Home Depot, this time choosing the color ‘Sand Dune’.

Sand Dune went up on the walls. And its tenure on those walls lasted exactly one day. Because this is the amount of time it took my mom to realize that, once painted on the walls, ‘Sand Dune’ looked exactly like the less exquisitely named color ‘Orange’.

“Well,” she said, “I can’t have this! I hate the color orange!”

I spoke with her later that evening and she told me, quite excitedly, that she had finally figured it out. “You know, the problem is that I wasn’t thinking outside the box! I realized that I needed to go in a completely opposite direction.”

“So what color are you going with mom?”

“PURPLE!”

This will be the third color in two weeks. And my dad is starting to worry that may have to begin dipping into their retirement fund just to finance my mom’s new paint fetish.

I just cringe that she’ll start watching old Trading Space episodes again to get more ideas and that I’ll go over one day to find straw, feathers, and cardboard pasted all over the walls in a Hildi-esque frenzy of inspiration.