The Colour of My Dreams

I don't often tell people about my dreams, but this is a good one.

Several months ago, I had a very vivid dream about the colour of our bedroom (this is the back bedroom upstairs, where we moved last summer when we realized it was actually warm at night in the winter). In the dream, the room was a light aqua colour, like water in a swimming pool, with a deep mushroom band around the bottom. It was right, so right, and the room seemed to be asking to be that colour.

Fast forward to this week, the week of Le Grand Redecoration, which is to say that Noel is out of town and my stupider impulses have free reign. I decided to tear down the panelling in the bedroom and repaint. In retrospect, this was not such a bright idea, but now I'm committed, so tally ho!

Here's the bedroom before, looking very untidy:

Dressers and bookcase removed; I decided to leave the bed because I have nowhere to put it, and I figured it would not be such a huge project.

Here's the amazing part. Not only were the walls once the colour in my dream, but the wood panelling below is very close to the colour of the deep mushroom band around the bottom.

I think it looks better than the panelling, even if the plaster is rather terrifyingly damaged. The panelling confirms my impression that this was a beach house, rather than a year-round house, when it was originally built. And it's definitely original. There's a large gap at the bottom that I guess explains how all those toys ended up in the wall.

My plan now is to get all the panelling out of the house (harder than it sounds, as I piled everything from the bedroom in the hallway), remove the remnants of wallpaper and nails, sand the glue off the plaster with the dust collecting sander (yay for dust collecting sanders!), then make a shopping list for the hardware store tomorrow.

On the list:

• plain wallpaper, to support the plaster as-is
• plaster repairing spackle-type stuff
• concealing primer
• some kind of wooden trim to cover the gap between the old panelling and the plaster

posted by ayse on 07/12/04