A Plain Old Yellow Living Room

Paint has the greatest influence in any space.  It gives you the ability to express a certain mood and make people feel differently.

Whites and beiges seem to be the most common colors.  They give a space a neutral, clean look that can work with just about any color scheme.  They also scream past dorm rooms and US apartments to me.  I am sick of them the way a kid gets sick of brussels sprouts after the first nose-plugging bite.

 

So when I had the chance to paint our Berlin home, there was no way I could pass it up.  I was done with white; I was sick of beige.  I wanted yellow. 

A yellow room has always seemed like the most romantic, amazing color to me.  I knew I wanted this color before we decided to move to Germany.  I knew it before I knew Martin.  As luck would have it, yellow walls happen to be a really wonderful thing to wake up to when it looks like this dark, wet yuckiness outside our windows on a rather regular basis in the winter.  (The flowers have kind of become indoor plants.  The wimps.)

flowers-in-the-rain

We didn’t have much in our house when I started painting.  There was the couch and our suitcases, the blowup mattress that served as our bed before the couch, and little bits of IKEA stuff like towels hanging on doorknobs and plates and cups struggling to find a place to fit in our original kitchen.  The lights were not installed; we had to find a drill that could go through our concrete ceiling to get them up.

Martin went on foot to find a drill while I started painting.  We didn’t have bikes then.  I don’t remember if it was cloudy that day (it’s Germany – it probably was), and I felt like I was spreading sunshine across our house with the yellow paint.  Martin eagerly agreed to yellow.  He even had a lot to do with our decision to paint a brown accent wall.

Painting is the perfect task for letting your mind wander.  You get to think about the people you know and the experiences you’ve had.  

I remembered the summer before.  I helped my parents paint their house and urged them to paint their living room a color called Biscuit-Something-or-Other.  I don’t remember exactly what the name was; they probably don’t either.  But you know what they do remember?  The first time they got to paint an apartment, the color they chose was Buffalo Brown.  Even my dad remembered, which meant I was beyond excited for the day we would be moving to Berlin.  Not only would my first home have a really cool paint name that Martin and I would remember forever, but it would be in a foreign language, too.  How cool would that be?

kitchen-completed-2

Back to the today.  Have I ever told you about Germans?  It is a world of engineers – very intelligent, detailed people.  When they do things, they’re fabulously precise.  Our efficient washing machine is nothing unique in a country of BMWs.  If a train is scheduled to come at 11:13, it’s coming at 11:13, not 11:14 like I had once tried.  Most cars are stick shifts because they’re just slightly more fuel efficient.  It’s amazing.

It also means that this country does not deal with silly things like Buffalo Brown paint.  There’s no Chestertown Buff or Green Trailing Vine.  Oh no.  I could think of a dozen beautiful names for our yellow wall color.  Instead you know what this color is called?

H2/1H1-2 neu 47

I was too sad to even check the brown.  I just call it the Pudding Wall and make sure there is no chocolate within easy reach when I’m working around it.