Comic Relief

...or is it? Well, let's see. It's definitely comic. Something straight out of the Simpsons. Relief? I don't think that's coming until this project is completed.

"What can she be referring to?" You ask.

Take a look for yourself.

The picture doesn't do the horror of the paint colors justice. I'm happy to clue you in on the not so comic adventure.

It all started on the Thursday before I was going to take an impromptu weekend away on a beach in North Carolina. Sounds fun, right. It was supposed to be fun. But serious, too. You see, I needed a little time away to escape the two concurrent bozPROJECTS at a stage where there is little I can do anyway.

But I also really wanted to spend some time with a very ill Grandma.

Before that could happen, on this fated Thursday, Kelly and I had to pick paint colors. (Kelly is my all-time favorite-extremely-talented-and amazingly-willing-to-put-up-with-my-crap-designer.) We picked a nice grey/brown base color to anchor the house to the earth - Rock Shell. And an equally nice and very progressive grey that tends toward blue/green tones for the siding. And finally, a slightly experimental mustard yellow for horizontal accents. We painted a swatch, loved it, ordered the paint and I left for the beach.

Not too painful so far. Until the painters ran out of paint and I got a call from boz. "We went to get more Rock Shell for the brick and the colors don't match. Turns out the paint 'newbie' mixed the wrong batch for our first 10 gallons and the real Rock Shell isn't even close." So, handle it.

To handle it, they decide the 10 gallons already on the house are ok and they go back and get more of the wrong formula to finish the brick. Problem solved, right? So far, so good. Crisis averted.

The rest is a bit of a blur to me. You see, I am still in NC...Not so much relaxing on a beach as trying to fit short trips in to visit my grandmother, while someone at the other bozPROJECT house is creating on ongoing email tirade (which I have to access and respond to throughout the four days on a cell phone with a stylus for a typing tool). So the paint colors seem to be the least of my problems. THAT IS UNTIL I RETURN HOME AND SEE THEM!

At some point while I am typing furiously (with a stylus, on a cell phone - I'm still bitter) in response to the insensitive and unprofessional emails; someone at the job site HAS seen the trim color go up on the house. And I'm not sure why, at that point, any one of the many people on that job site didn't say, "Oh my God! Stop painting! It's horrible!"

I'm not positive what was going through their minds. Here are some possible options:

1) "Goodness, Kimble has some really progressive taste in colors. I'm not sure I get it, but since she is ALWAYS picking things that are cartoon-like and the houses ALWAYS seem to sell; we should trust her judgment. Keep painting."
2) "Oh dear, Kimble really is a wiz at marketing. While the rest of the world knows the US 'Human' real estate market is going a little soft, she is going to corner the US 'Cartoon' real estate market! We just might have another Springfield on our hands here - Lisa and Bart will just love that playset out back."

Nope, not sure what happened. But I know that $4000 into a $5000 painting job, I got home from the trip and put a stop to the painting until we could sort this out.

So now the painters are having a bit of a deja-vu moment as the cover all the mustard color around the windows with a more subtle, contrast color. Once that issue is fixed, the paint company will make right the Rock Shell and the same painters will have another deja-vu moment as they spray the brick with something more like a grey-ish brown and less like the color of the MIDNIGHT SKY!

Thank goodness the painting contractor, the designer and the paint suppliers are so accommodating. Thank goodness for cucumber mask to soothe the red circles under my eyes. And lucky me to have yet another expensive life lesson to remind myself why vacations never really end up 'relaxing' when a project is going on. I need to remain a control freak, clearly.