First published in the Tri-Town Transcript on Aug 24, 2016
By By Esther C. Baird
We recently decided to redecorate our kitchen and family room. Our current yellow was tired and increasingly sullen instead of bright. We wanted to choose fun, new colors and get fun, new furniture.
So. Much. Fun.
Fun, for people who have one single brain cell of design sense. Sadly, for our house, my brain was where decorating never made it past page one of a Pottery Barn catalog. This perplexed many of my design-savvy friends.
They chit chatted away about curtain valances versus curtain panels and then looked at me expectantly. I’d look back. What? Were they hoping I’d understood a thing they’d said?
“Umm . . . I don’t like curtains. I live in Boxford with sweeping views and no nearby neighbors. Why on earth would I hang something across that??”
That generally stopped the conversation. But it also stopped progress. Finally, we asked one of these friends for professional help. I am extremely sure that she had no idea what she was getting into when she agreed. I’ll just say this up front, saints come in many different styles and colors (see how I spoke a little design lingo there?). She is one such saint.
We began with paint. She fanned a wave of paint colors at me that contained every color of the rainbow and its sixty million sub-hues.
“So . . . what are you thinking for the kitchen?” She asked.
I wasn’t thinking about it at all. That was precisely the problem. “Umm . . . not yellow?”
She nodded encouragingly. “Exactly!”
Then she pursed her lips and fanned her colors looking for just the right shade of not yellow. “What about this blue?” She held it up, “or you know, something bold like this.”
She held up two, small, sugar-packet sized squares of blue.
“They’re both blue,” I said. But then I felt like I was letting her down, “but they are exciting blues!!”
She nodded at me like I’d made a great artistic observation. With a few paint options in play, I breathed a sigh of relief. That hadn’t been too bad. But then she began to talk about the importance of rugs and the placement of sofas.
“Couches can’t hang off in outer space beyond the rug, you need a rug big enough to pull the sofa off the wall and place it just here.” She pointed to how it would work.
I couldn’t track. “But right now when I sit on my sofa I can just place my drink on the half wall it’s up against. In your scenario, there will be just empty space behind my couch.”
“That’s what a sofa table is for.” She said calmly.
“But if there is a sofa table behind my couch, where will I put my Christmas tree during the holidays? No one will see the lower branches where I put the tacky, crafty ornaments the girls made. The sofa tables are going to ruin Christmas!”
I was handling things amazingly well.
She took this moment to segue into a less emotionally fraught topic, and asked if I was more of a casual, or chesterfield, or perhaps mid-century person. You know, with respect to how the couch arms swooped and swirled.
Except, Regular Reader, no, I don’t know. I mean, seriously, if I hucked a chesterfield at you, would recognize what you’d been hit with?
I was still fraught. “I want a couch I can spill red wine and chocolate ice cream on without mortgaging my house to clean it. I want a couch I can take a nap on, but also, if a dog or baby throws up, life will continue. Whatever that couch is, that’s the one for me.”
My friend realized I represented a new level of hopeless and began to simply pick things. She made decisions right and left and created a whole room that looked conceptually fabulous. I couldn’t explain to you why it all worked, I just knew it did and that I didn’t have to worry about what century my couch arm represented.
Now I can’t wait till it all arrives so I can look out from my bold blues and indestructible yet stylish sofas, onto our rolling Boxford yard through my windows that, in the only design choice I actually made, will still have no curtains.