“Woah…that’s so not green!” Mini-Me was standing in the doorway of the room which, when I had moved back to the house, I had nicknamed Tora Bora. Her eyes were on stalks and she didn’t know whether to be horrified or delighted with my newly revealed redecorating, particularly my paint choice. ”Daddy will not like this…!”
Out of loyalty and some quickly mustered maturity, I didn’t comment. The injection of some colour and clutter into what had previously been my pristine white and neutral home - before six and half years away and two sets of tenants, including one family with three teenage boys who must have had to sleep suspended from the light fittings just to find some room – was something I was relishing. Without sounding cringingly naff, in spite of the hard work – painting ’til after midnight sometimes and getting totally fed up with the smell of paint and the constant mess, not to mention wrecking my fingernails – it has been fantastically therapeutic to create a new home for me and Mini-Me and to do pretty much what I wanted with the place. The sight of the ‘feature’ wall in the formerly cave-like garden room, where even welcomed guests were banished to stay, made me smile every time I looked at it. I’d painted three walls in white, including the exposed brick work, and had gone wild on the fourth.
“But I thought you wanted green, Mummy?” said Mini-Me, rather exasperatedly. “We spent ages doing all those testers!”
She was right, of course. I had spent a long time splodging squares of various shades of green on the wall and had constantly been popping into the room to see which one grabbed me, finally making a decision - Farrow & Ball’s Teresa’s Green. Why the colour belongs to her, I have no clue. Or maybe it’s a description of Teresa herself? However, as is typical of me – hours of careful plans being suddenly wasted by one spontaneous move – when I did get to the store a few days later and being faced with the rows of paint choices, I made a sudden and dramatic U-turn in my decision, bought a couple of cans of paint, took a deep breath and, without even testing the colour, slapped two coats on the wall.
