In 2005, my husband and I purchased our first home. The walls were bright orange. Not like, pretty and muted orange. Bright Tennessee Volunteers make your eyes bleed Home Depot orange. The other walls were purple. Like… Halloween candy bright crazy purple.
So we painted. And painted. And painted. And eventually the house looked like our home. (Butter yellow and muted grass green and deep peanut-butter beige.)
An epic short sale and near-foreclosure later, we live in a rental home. The walls are all beige. All of them. They’re also a matte paint that smudges if you so much as breathe on it. We painted my son’s room a bright nutball Nickelodeon-esque green but beyond that we haven’t done much in the way of renovating. We were fortunate that the house had been somewhat remodeled before we moved in.
Still, the colors bum me out sometimes. Luckily I have my crazy green couch and deep blue chair and a little art and my son’s school projects to brighten the walls.
Since we don’t have home projects inside, I’ve satisfied my nesting-needs by working on the landscaping out front. I haven’t done all that much, but this spring when weeds took over and my landlords didn’t come by to do their usual gardening, I took matters into my own hands. I re-mulched, I pulled weeds, I removed all the plants that died in the strangely cold winter.
I planted flowers and some herbs in pots and I bought a silly little ceramic turtle. And you know what? It looks pretty nice. I’m proud of it. I’m proud of the blisters I got. I’m proud that I’ve only killed four small flowering plants so far.
For now, the rest of the house will be beige and lived in and kind of scattered with toys and color. Sometimes I hate renting but other times it’s kind of nice to have a home project to-do-list that only lives in my imagination.
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