Renovate Brooklyn! Day Thirty: Almost A Wash...

Ugh. Last night's "After-Dinner Design" nearly took us down. You know, you do all of these GIGANTOR projects of ridiculous complexity, and you knock 'em out, one-two-three. And then one fateful evening, you decide you want to add a little more "pop" to your living room, and it nearly leads to your untimely undoing.

Or that's how it feels at the moment.

It began with "pop". (Please excuse the cliche blogging word, but that's what I was after.) I had a pair of matching slug grey vintage lamps, and it suddenly occurred to me that I was not obligated to keep them slug grey. So, I hopped out for a couple spray cans of primer, and picked up a nice terracotta pot while I was at it. I figured I'd prime them all, paint them all, and - Voila! Pop!

Except I had been tapped to make dinner last night (which I will talk about later today) so I asked John if he'd take them out onto the fire-escape and spray them down while I was cooking. That way we could watch a movie after dinner while I painted, and everyone would be happy. Grand plan. Ha.

So out John goes, and a couple minutes later, I hear a crash and a very dismayed face pops up in the window. Oops. He says, and it is the kind of oops that confirms your love for this face. Because if it was someone else, you might throttle them. Evidently, when John picked up one of the lamps by the neck, the whole electrical component pulled out and the lamp dropped to the ground. Into a fair number of pieces. I'm tempted to say smithereens, but I think it was slightly fewer than that. ( I would also like to clarify in case it is not apparent, that I think John got royally screwed on this. Because of course he felt totally guilty about killing the lamp, but really it was unforeseeable, especially when it's 8:30 at night and you're perched on an unlit fire escape. Totally screwed.)

And this is what everything looked like once it had been spray-primed. Note the decimated lamp laying like a dinosaur skeleton in the back ground. Totally screwed, I tell you.

So after this debacle, we ate dinner- which was sublime by the way- and then sat down to watch The Social Network. And John responsibly laid out a drop cloth for me, and off I went, merrily painting. I had decided to paint all the bits and bobs the same Benjamin Moore "Flame" color that I had painted the bedroom dressers, which worked out great as I still had almost a full quart of left over paint. Change for free! Excellent!

Except then I knocked over a glass of wine with the end of my paint brush.
And now change was not free. Change was that part of the sofa was Côtes-du-Rhône-Red now.
We were having an awesome evening.

But we dashed to the kitchen, dabbed water all over the wine on the sofa, and miraculously, it all came out. And I don't want to be silly here, but seriously. Miraculous. Tinkling-of-chimes-organ music-rays-of-light-from-above kinds of miraculous, because if you remember rightly, the couch is a pale beige wool.  And so it is again today. Whew. That was a close one.

The good news was that at the end of this stream of bungles, John was able to glue the lamp back together, and as long as you don't look too closely, you'd never now it had happened. (Also, don't pick it up because it's missing a hunk out of the back...) The other funny realization: as I painted the terracotta pot, I realized that it looked almost exactly the same as terracotta, though in person it is definitely more bold than it appears here. This was definitely not our best project day...

The next big color question... when is some orange too much orange? I was thinking about buying some fabric to make an orange pillow to brighten up the couch a little and have found a couple of great contenders, though I'm a little nervous that things are getting a little "matchy-matchy" around these parts, and John is eyeing up these fabric samples with some skepticism.
  

That could also be because I was considering buying some of these office storage containers from IKEA, to reign in the paper situation in that side of the living room, and add another little "pop" down that end. But really, maybe I'm getting a little carried away.

Because once you start looking, there is a ton of bright orange stuff available-- great chairs, magazine racks, rugs, you name it. But I don't want it to look like the Orange Growers of America Club House in here, so we'll see how I go...