antique white.

It seems to be a general rule that when you buy paint or paint supplies, cashiers will ask you about it. Sometimes when you buy brown sugar, flour, eggs, butter and chocolate chips at the grocery store, the cashier will make a cookie related comment. But not always, because sometimes you get a vacant-stared teenager or some college kid who never realized that cookies don't grow in nature and are instead of made of other things. But paint seems to be obvious enough. You are buying paint. Ergo, you must be painting something.

"So what are you painting?"

"My house."

"Which rooms?"

"All of them."

For some reason, that seems surprising to them. Maybe people only paint one room at a time. Not being a cashier at a paint-supply store, I don't know about the painting habits of the general population. One guy even asked me if I was doing it all by myself. I'm not sure if he thought it sounded like an awful lot of work, or if perhaps he'd been looking for a girl to paint houses with and thought this was his chance.

In any case, it is an awful lot of work. I've painted every day for a week except Tuesday, when my muscles were so sore that they demanded I lie on the couch and eat homemade enchiladas instead.

My previous painting experience is limited. I painted stage sets in high school, which was fun. There was a lot of goofing off and a pretty low standard for quality. We had a huge set of brushes and rollers. Half the time they were crusty with the previous day's paint because the doofus who was responsible for cleaning them hadn't bothered to do it. Then there were the days when I was supposed to clean them, and I understood why the other guy had been lazy. It seemed to take forever to clean the stupid brushes. How did any paint get on the sets when there was clearly a whole can's worth stored in this stupid roller?

In college, I helped paint part of my first apartment. Okay, it said in the lease that we were not supposed to paint. But the neighbors had done it. And when we mentioned that fact to the leasing office manager when we were viewing the place, he said it would be fine as long as he got to approve the colors. Then, we were bad tenants, because we just went ahead and used whatever colors we wanted without consulting him. But we found out later that he wasn't being quite honest with us, either. He would have only approved the off-white color that was already on the walls. Apparently, he thought college girls wanted to paint their apartments solely for the joy of painting.

I happened upon some paint at a yard sale during the first summer in the apartment. Something like four cans of paint for $5. They were bright colors - blue, red, yellow, orange. I painted the kitchen yellow and my bedroom blue. Then I painted half the hallway red. I don't remember why I stopped after only doing half the work. Maybe I had to go somewhere or maybe I just got sick of it. My attention to the task was obviously wavering, as I used the brush to spell out my name across the top of the wall. Then I painted over half of it and left it for, oh, eight months or so. We had half a red room, with the letters "DRA" at the top. Finally, one of my roommates got sick of it and finished the job. I can imagine getting a roommate performance review: "Pays rent on time. Is quiet, non-smoker. Sorta messy. Will paint half a wall, write her name on it in giant red letters and consider the job done."

Then, when we left the apartment, we had to paint it again: a coat of mold-killing primer followed by two coats of "Antique White." It was not a good time. It felt like punishment, which it was and which we deserved.

Because of that incident, I started taking leases more seriously when they said "NO PAINTING." I lived surrounded by Antique White for the next four years. It's not that it bothered me so much, but it made me feel sorta old and boring sometimes. I know, that's unfair to people who like Antique White who may not actually be old and boring. It's also unfair to old and boring people who may not even like Antique White.

But now! Now, I have a house, and I, as my landlord, say that I can paint the walls, provided I approve the colors beforehand. I picked out something pretty similar to Antique White, actually. And then the paint guy added a bunch of colors to the Antique White and put it in this violent shaking machine. I tried to watch the violent shaking, but that made me nauseous. We opened up the can, and it was a beautiful dark orange/red, the color of brick. Then we did the same thing to another can, but it turned out to be the color of a tulip stem. Then I decided that beets had a very pleasant hue to them. I am not afraid of color.

Having all this time to spend working alone on the house is a sort of mixed blessing. I feel like I'm getting to know my house. For instance, I now know the color of the floor under the fridge. And there is some trim in the living room that is a little broken. That mysterious weird box on the wall in the hall controls the doorbells. I am learning the house's secrets, which is only fair, since it's seen me naked a bunch of times already.

I am also transforming it a bit. The walls were beige before, and that was fine for someone else, but I'm going to need a little color in my life. Sure, my stuff was in it, and that alone would have differentiated it from the house of anyone else. After ten years of buying used, I have fairly distinctive stuff. But this feels much less temporary. I hung all those same pictures in those apartments, knowing full well that I would later take them down from the Antique White walls and move them somewhere else. This has a sense of permanence. This is my house. I am invested in it. I have literally coated it with myself, sometimes two coats.

It's an awful lot of work and it's expensive. Paint is not a common yard sale item; I don't think I've seen any since I bought those cans seven years ago. But I approve this expense. I'm not planning on doing much in the way of improvement or renovation to the house for a while, having shot my wad buying it in the first place. Compared to knocking down a wall or redoing the cabinents, painting is cheap. And it makes a huge difference. Already, I look at the completed rooms and just feel happy with how much better they look, how much more interesting they are. It feels more like a home, and less like a place where my stuff just happens to be.

It's an awful lot of work, though.