Decorating Hell

I have an orange sofa. Or it may be a couch. Or a settee or davenport. I guess they are all different, but I don’t know what it is. It has three cushions for sitting, and three cushions to lean back against. For the sake of argument, I’ll call it a sofa. And mine is orange.

It hasn’t always been orange. It was a light green canvas in a previous life. About fifteen years ago we reupholstered in in a faux-suede, light brown cloth. The color was called cinnamon. And it was apt. The sofa was the same color as the ground cinnamon in the jar in my kitchen.

A month or so ago my wife decided it was time to reupholster the sofa again. I guess it’s one of those biological clock things that women have, like when it’s time to strip the kitchen floor or repaint the cabinets. An internal bell goes off, and we have to act on it.

Decorating issues are fraught with problems for me. Mostly, I don’t really care how the house is decorated, as long as it isn’t bizarre. I mean, I do want to live in attractive surroundings but rarely have a deep-seated need to have a particular color or style. My wife usually picks, and I have veto power. However, on this one, I was pressed to participate. If I don’t care about the recovering of the sofa, then I don’t care about our relationship. That’s kind of a big jump for me to grasp. So apparently, I had to care about the sofa.

I considered it and came up with what is probably the most common suggestion of men backed into a decorating corner. I said let’s cover it in the same cloth – cinnamon fake suede. Surprisingly, this went over well, and the deal was made. Our sofa was taken away. A few weeks later they brought it back. It was orange. Sometime in the past fifteen years the color cinnamon apparently morphed from light brown to orange. Who knew? Color me surprised.

We put the sofa back in the den and even I could tell it clashed with the walls and curtains. Yellow walls in no way enhance an orange sofa. So the wife repainted the den. Once again, I was pressed into a decision on color, and again, I convinced her to pick and I rubber stamped it. We went with Churchill White, which isn’t white and I don’t know how Churchill got involved. It kind of looks like white that got left out in the weather for a few years.

Next my wife decided that we needed new curtains to go with the orange sofa. For the next two weekends I participated in what I called the Bataan death march. We spent the better part of two weekends going to fabric store after fabric store looking at samples of cloth. As a guy who doesn’t like shopping in any form, I was brain dead a couple hours after we started. But I gave a considered response to every piece of cloth my wife picked up. I had a few non-negotiables – no paisley, no flame tip and no cabbage roses like the print dresses my widest aunt used to wear to church.

Not happy with our excursions, my wife next decided to bring in an interior decorator to help. Excellent, I thought. Let her make the decisions. She and my wife picked out curtain fabric that was floral, but mostly non-offensive. But she decided the wall color was wrong. So my wife, the family painter, repainted the living room a beige-blue-gray color. I guess it has some imaginative name, but I think “cloudy day”.

The decorator also recommended changing the floor covering. We had basic beige carpet, twenty years old, but in excellent condition. I think the color was called wheat. We decided to go with an area rug over the carpet. She found a large rug, some 10×12 feet with patterns and colors I could live with. Not wanting to put the rug down over a dirty carpet, we called in the professional cleaners and had the carpet shampooed.

I wasn’t home the day the new rug was delivered, but we had moved the furniture out of the den so the guys could lay it out. The story I got from my wife was that the delivery guy dropped it on the porch and asked her to sign for it. She told him we had paid extra to have them lay out the carpet because it was too heavy for us to lift (we both have back issues). He wouldn’t move it, saying he didn’t care what the agreement was. So she refused to sign for it. The delivery guy refused to remove the rug and left it on our porch. My wife called the company and told them to come get the rug and return our money. They dragged their feet, so she called back after a few days and said they could collect their rug in two days or she was giving it to Good Will. They came and got the rug and refunded most of the money. They wanted to retain some of it for some nonsense about restocking fee. My wife complained to Visa, and suddenly the company made a full refund.

After the rug fiasco, my wife told me that getting a new carpet would be no more expensive than the cost of the rug. I had about had it with decorating at this point and told her to get whatever she wanted. She still brought in carpet samples for me to approve. In the end I watched them tear out our good condition, newly cleaned beige carpet and put in new beige carpet. I find the color indistinguishable from the old carpet color. They are both the color of oatmeal. She says I’m colorblind if I can’t see the difference. Colorblindness doesn’t work that way, but that’s not an argument I need to have.

So I have a new beige carpet, cloudy day walls, and mostly non-offensive curtains. And an orange sofa.