Battle of the beige

In spite of what I’ve said about growing old, some things just don’t improve with age. Thank goodness we live in wine country and I’ve got a huge wine rack in my kitchen. The wine is aging nicely, but the kitchen. Oh, my. The kitchen. Oh, sure, our kitchen is mostly intact for a room that started out as a woodshed back in the late 1800s. Somewhere along the way the woodshed became a kitchen and another woodshed was added behind the kitchen/woodshed. If you live in an old house in the County, chances are you know what I’m saying about add-ons. We bought this house 26 years ago because the previous owners did their homework and had the place “staged” in a homely kinda way. We liked the kitchen then and we naïvely thought it was the original kitchen. In fact, it fooled a lot of people, our goofy-floored, woodshed/kitchen did. At best it looked like it could accommodate our wild bunch of kids. The new cabinets were solid and plentiful, even though there seemed to be a lot of “shim” going on. The wallpaper was an innocuous beige selection, sprinkled with teensy orange flowers. The vinyl floor was beige on beige. The countertops were beige, “Papyrus” to be exact. The light fixture was, wait for it, beige. And, the woodwork, you guessed it, painted beige. The ceiling wasn’t beige, but it was covered in wood fibre ceiling tiles. The previous owners even left their beige curtains—the kind you cut to fit and didn’t have to hem. The curtains were beige.

So for years LOML and I, in spite of the noise kids make at the trough, snored through meals in a beige kitchen. During the 80s we were more involved with paying the bills than with tarting up the joint. Over the years the corners of the wallpaper behind the sink and around the stove began to curl up and no amount of white glue would make it right. I began to pick away at the paper. Come on, don’t tell me you haven’t done the same thing. And then, one morning as I was wiping oatmeal off my face, I cracked. Falling into a beige sleep over my beige oatmeal had happened one time too many. While LOML was out of town taking care of business, I treated the kids to a day of video tapes, takeout pizzas, bowls of popcorn and a big jug of apple juice, and I went postal on the beige.

I had taken the advice of a friend, attacking the beige wallpaper with a “tiger” and spray bottle full of wallpaper remover, a.k.a. fabric softener diluted with water. By the end of the day, our kid-infested living room smelled and looked like a high school locker in June. The teenagers were asleep on the floor and the youngest, left to her own devices, had made a home for her Barbies out of the pizza boxes and covered the coffee table with pepperoni “spots.” As for the kitchen, at the end of the day, it wasn’t beige anymore. The homely beige kitchen was a damp, grey disaster. Seriously, how could I have known the 1950s owner wouldn’t have known there was a right side and a wrong side to plasterboard back in the day? My formerly beige kitchen became a soggy mess of “wrong side out” plasterboard covered in “tiger tracks” smelling like Downy and a papier mâché project. Having to replace some of the plasterboard with drywall revealed the truth about the kitchen’s past as a woodshed.

Eventually, all of the woodwork was painted bright white. White wallpaper with Jacobean flowers replaced the beige and for the next decade jarred me out of my gruel droop every morning. The cabinets were painted and the flooring was replaced with white vinyl. Where the ceiling tile had once resided, thousands of staples were pulled out of the tongue and groove ceiling, which was then painted white. The countertop was in good condition and my $800 “reno” budget was done. Who could ask for anything more than white, white, white?

And, here I am on a beautiful long weekend thinking maybe the overwhelming white kitchen wasn’t such a hot idea. I’ve been picking away at the 1990s wallpaper and a solid blue now will ease me through the morning crosswords, oatmeal and political shenanigans. Yessir, the shocking white cabinets and trim have been re-done in a colour that leans, ever so slightly, toward beige. And the white ceiling fan/light fixture isn’t looking as state-of-the-art as it once did. Aw, what is it about restful, long weekends?

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca