Pompeii Red

Sitting at the breakfast table the other morning, my husband out of the blue said, "I want to paint the wall over the fireplace."

Oh, no, here we go again, I sighed . . . only to myself, I wouldn't want to offend the guy. It's just that every so often he gets this urge to paint something. My kitchen now has blue and yellow walls. He convinced his company to paint their interiors green and orange.

Not that he doesn't have a great sense of style and color. It's just that I don't have "the vision thing." I can never imagine what something is going to look like if you change it. I like things just the way they are, thank you very much. If it's not broken, why fix it? And so on. 

So, I have learned to close my eyes and make the leap of faith. If he thinks it'll be great, it'll probably be great, so I let him paint. The only thing I have learned to put my foot down on is the choice of color. The blue and yellow kitchen was my last act of total blind faith. Live and learn.

He magnanimously said, "You chose the color. If you're happy, I'm happy." Such a sweet guy. So, what color do I want? Hard to say, when I really kind of like the wall white, just the way it was . . .

And then it hit me, Pompeii Red, the perfect color to complement our red and brown sofas and red-brown Oriental carpet. Decision made, the man dashed off to the hardware store and immediately came back with a 

can of paint labelled "Pompeii Red." 

Perfect!

Until he started painting . . .

Pompeii brown maybe . . .

That is so not red, it's brown, plain old brown to my eyes.

Opinions differ on what shade Pompeii Red actually is. Check out the variety here.

And so began a day-long paint-mixing experiment. What color would we get if we added a bit of red? Or white? A touch of yellow?

Still too dark! I wanted a bright, luminous color, not a dead, flat color.

Finally, we found the perfect blend.

The maestro at work.

Well? What do you think? Does it work?

Does it say Pompeii Red to you?

Too much of a good thing is never enough when my husband is painting, so we got a bonus accent wall panel, too.