a hint of orange

dear readers, let me tell you about what happened in my kitchen yesterday. no, let me start with the day before that.

me and my sweetheart were wondering over breakfast what we could do to brighten up our kitchen a little for the winter months.
we had not given this much attention when we were still renovating our flat last winter, but now as november comes rolling in wet and cold as fog we discovered that our kitchen does not catch any sunlight from late october to early april. we have a nice big window, the kitchen is light enough, but the sun doesn’t make it around the corner like during the spring and summer months when it shines into our kitchen just at the right time for our late-afternoon gathering there.
so, we decided to paint one wall of our kitchen (the one that gets the sun during the summer months) a warm, bright, friendly, sunny yellow. with a hint of orange. you know, the color of egg yolks when those hens have been fed a little carotene so their egg yolks don’t look so pale during the winter.

off we went to the DIY superstore to get the right color mixed. we took a light switch and outlet fixture along that we found in the flea market (dating back to the seventies, i’m sure) that happened to have just the right color and showed that to the guy who mixed the paint. he raised an eyebrow. then he explained to us that we needed to paint a special base coat if we wanted to obtain that specific warm, bright, friendly, sunny yellow with a hint of orange. well, okay, we said, then we’ll buy the base coat paint, too. we left the store happily but noticably poorer, carrying two gallon buckets of paint.

so yesterday was the big day. after breakfast and after i had my unabdicable wednesday swim, we opened the bucket labeled “base coat”. and, believe me, i almost threw up. the content of that bucket had the most disgusting shade of pink you can imagine. it was revolting. it was the color of something you’d buy in a sex shop. something almost, but not altogether resembling reproductive organs.
i convinced myself that since this was only the base coat for our warm, bright, friendly, sunny yellow with a hint of orange you wouldn’t see anything of it after our work was done, so we commenced the painting of our pristine white kitchen wall that catches the sunlight so nicely during the summer but sadly does not during the winter. when we finished, i wanted to cry. we have a putrid pink kitchen wall now. the base coat requires to dry for at least 24 hours so now we’re stuck with this until tomorrow morning.

i absolutely refuse to eat anything in this kitchen until then.

~ by bine on November 1, 2007.