Friday, September 7, 2012

The Sadness of Orange

I have had a good appreciation of a beautiful rusty autumnal orange for years, but last fall, orange made an unprecedented and unpredicted move up in my personal color ratings to second place. (First being maintained by my favorite of over 10 years: red.) That spring, orange started showing up all over the fashion-world and juicing its way into other facets of design. As I kept being drawn to it on the shelves and racks, I decided I wanted to feature orange as my accent color in my craft room, so the hunt began for the perfect shade.

I didn't want the crazy hazardous shade used for warning signs and road construction. While I love the deep oranges, they make me want to snuggle up with a mocha or hot chocolate, a book, and Ivan, not exactly conducive to crafting. I wanted an orange with depth and leaning towards red but that was also vibrant and energizing. One day, while browsing the Internet, I stumbled across it, the perfect shade! And *gasp* how amazing am I for being on trend without even knowing it? Pantone apparently declared the 2012 color of the year the exact shade I had been hunting: Tangerine Tango.

A little while later, while browsing through Sephora, I came across an end cap display: apparently Sephora paired with Pantone to create a limited edition line of Tangerine Tango products. I had already found myself a stellar orange nail polish to paint my little piggies and didn't feel the need to have 4 more similarly colored bottles with different finishes. However, I started lusting after the box in which the polishes were packaged. While it featured the aforementioned color, it was covered in delightful little squares crossing the orange spectrum! I lamented on Facebook about not knowing someone who worked at a Sephora and could keep an eye out for a damaged out box sans polish they could rescue for me. Not terribly long after, this arrived in the mail from a friend. (She even told me she made sure she found the box in the best condition at the store when she bought it.)
Thank you Jasmine!

The plants by the BBQ|
finally blossomed during
this time...and look
what color the lilies are!
I promptly took the coveted box down to McLendon's to find the closest matching paint color. I decided upon Tawny Day Lily. No, I wasn't going to paint the walls of my craft room. I prefer to do my artwork in a room where the walls are very light and neutral so their current soft pale gray color is staying. The reason is that if the walls were orange, the light that bounced around the room would be affected and not give a very accurate idea of the color I'm selecting for a project. Therefore, my plan is to incorporate the orange as delightful pops here and there. My plan for this particular pint of paint was intended for a bookcase. We had a large oak-veneer bookcase in the garage that I had been intending to repaint as it was rather ugly. After researching what my guru Lindsay shared about painting furniture, I rolled up my metaphorical sleeves and got to work.


Primed and after the first coat of orange.
Spray paint primer was a total no-go for me. I followed the directions on the can, together with the tips and tricks I had gleaned from the Internet, yet after three light coats and 2 cans, coverage was still poor and hazy. Back to the store for a can of Zinsser 1-2-3 primer, a paint tray, and new roller brush cover. MUCH better (and faster!). To the right you can see after the first coat of orange was applied. Unfortunately, this was in July when we were having SUPER hot weather, and the paint was drying so fast that I couldn't keep a leading wet edge and coverage was still a little uneven and streaky. Initially, I had planned to keep the top part of the permanent shelves white, but later decided to make them orange as well.

All told, it probably took me about 6 weeks to get the bookcase painted to my satisfaction. I had to wait for it to neither be raining nor too hot, to have a good chunk of time so I could get an entire coat done. That darn orange ended up requiring about 3-4 coats per surface to get it thick, creamy, and even! That was with a semi-gloss finish, too, which is supposed to be more forgiving of brush strokes.

Finally, the day had arrived! My beautiful bookcase was just as I had envisioned and ready to go up the stairs to my craft room. And then? And THEN?!

THE SADNESS OCCURRED

I'll bet you know what I'm going to write next. Yup. The bookcase would not fit up the stairs. Its beautiful size, intended to house my myriad (and currently messy) supplies, was its downfall. See, our stairs are an L-shape and the curve on the landing couldn't accomodate the length and width of this tawny beast. While the height on the main floor was ample to allow for the bookcase to be carried up on its side, and there was even more space on the second set of stairs, the ceiling height over the landing is low. Too low. No matter how we tried, the geometry was plain. I found myself swearing and wishing Richard would mistakenly open a door at that moment, allowing the extra space to make the turn, but alas, no time and space-bending conundrum occurred. So I did what any reasonable person who had spent a good many of the precious, beautiful and far too few gorgeous sunny Puget Sound summer days outside painting would do: I sat down on the stairs and had a bit of a cry.
It's around this point that J unhelpfully mentions that he had HAD the passing thought that we should check to make sure it would fit up the stairs. Stupidly, I hadn't. I figured if we had been able to move a queen bed up those stairs, a bookcase would fit as well. Lesson learned, the hard way.
Ivan inspects the sadness of orange

Later that sad week, I went to Ikea and bought the Hemnes bookcase. We carried the box upstairs where I assembled it in the room. I've left the back off for now. Trying to find the time (and heart) to buy some more orange paint to paint the back panel. It won't be quite the same as it will just be the back and not the entire interior or shelves.



1 comment:

  1. It's intense, but I really like the color of the bookcase. I also think just painting the back of the new cabinet will look great. Remember to take Ivan out first. I have a little cabinet that I've used for yarn that you might be able to incorporate into your craft room. I'll send a photo. I think I would have tried to cut this cab into two pieces right below the shelf, then put pretty hinges on the side and back, retouch the paint, and have it be able to be moved almost anywhere when it's in two pieces. Of course, getting it to someone who could make a decent cut would be a challenge.

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