Oh, Thank God, This ISN'T!

Johnny got home yesterday before I finished writing that last post. I was going to put one more picture up, of the pink and green together, but he walked in at the last minute. He asked me what I was writing and I said "Nothing!," hit "publish," and shut down.

Here's that picture:
And actually, I'm lying. That's not the picture I took yesterday. The sun was too bright yesterday and it made the the pink of the porcelain look white. I took this one just now. It's raining now.

But I'm right. Right?

So anyway, another thing I didn't say yesterday was that he had left the bathroom door closed and the fan on to blow the fumes out. When he got home, he asked me if I'd looked.

I said yes, but that was all I said.

He said "I didn't have enough of the grey to do two coats."

Oh, that's right. It was going to be the same grey as the other bathroom! This grey:

Yeesh! Remember him? Sorry, Dad...

Anyway, it's barely grey at all -- you may not even be able to tell in this picture that it isn't white -- but it isn't, and I love it, and that's what this other bathroom was supposed to be.

But there wasn't enough left.

See, when Johnny (painter, remember) finishes a job, people never want to keep the extra paint. I don't know why they don't, you never know when you might knock a chair into the wall and need to do some touching-up. But then again, the people Johnny works for tend to be the kind of people who a. would never knock a chair into the wall because they're classier than that and besides, each one of their chairs is probably worth more than I paid for my car; and b. if, god forbid, they did, they'd call Johnny back to re-do the entire room.

What I'm saying is: these folks can afford to throw away a quart of paint.

But Johnny doesn't throw it away. He keeps it. Our basement is a veritable museum of custom colors. And when we've got a wall that needs a coat or two, Johnny doesn't visualize a color from thin air, and he doesn't flip through a color wheel. He goes shopping. In the basement.

The first criteria for what color a thing will be is whether or not we have it. The second is whether we have enough. Third comes slapping samples on the wall to see what sticks. Something usually does. But not always.

There's never enough of anything down there for an entire room. Or, rather, there aren't enough acceptable choices. There may be enough of one or two things, but they may not be appropriate for the task at hand. So then he sucks it up and puts his Mastery to work. The sage green in my bedroom he had made, and paid for. The soft sand in the living room as well. They're both wonderful -- but, honestly, not any more wonderful than the leftover (and free!) colors he uses in the smaller corners of the house.

So whither this puke green in the bath?

We were in the car on the way back from the thing we'd planned to do together yesterday afternoon, when he finally piped up:

"I didn't have enough of that grey to put two coats on the bathroom."

"Yeah, you mentioned."

"I can get some more -- Larry's got some, I'll get it from him next week." Larry, the fella Johnny works for, who curates the other half of the Paint Collection. "But I had to get a coat of something on there so I could finish up the prep."

I've lived with him for ten years without ever noticing that -- for Masters, anyway -- there is a final stage of prep work that gets done after you put on the first coat of paint.

"So..." I'm treading delicately, but I have to clarify. "It isn't green, then?"

"No!" he says. "Unless you like it."

"No!" I mean, "I like the idea of the grey much better."

Phew!

So that was yesterday. Just now I asked him what he would have thought if I'd said yes when he offered to leave it if I liked. He winced.

"No," he said. "It's just a primer.

"I was only trying to be nice."