Last Word: My Home-Makeover Disaster

Because orange is my favorite color.

By Elizabeth Breston, Illustration by Jessica Wetterer

I painted our house orange for a day—traffic-cone orange—or, candy-corn orange, to be accurate. It was a premeditated decision. I brushed aside my contractor’s concerns that my paint choice was too bright or that maybe the canary-yellow trim I picked was too much. Did I mention the neon lime green I chose for the sheds in the backyard?

The previous owners had painted the house a bank-lobby forest green with burgundy trim. The inside had been painted a rain-cloud gray, which I remedied before we moved in, with a warm white and healthy doses of raspberry, yellow, orange and melon green.

When I met with the painter, he said through a wide grin that my house would look like a piñata. That sounded better than a bank lobby to me. On the morning when the painters were to begin, my contractor called one last time to ask if I was certain that I wanted orange, that particular orange. I was not turning back.

A busy schedule had me on the go, and I returned to the house mid-afternoon. What I saw when I turned the corner onto our street was an orange mistake of radioactive proportions. Our house was pulsating under a glowing orb that ricocheted off the homes on either side. I had created an orange force field that encompassed half the street. If it weren’t my house, it would have been awe-inspiring. The young couple next door told me later that they thought they were experiencing the apocalypse when they walked into their kitchen. The rest of the neighbors tried not to make eye contact.

I was greeted by the painter, who still had a big smile on his face. This time, he told me that my house was {hot, hot, hot} as he opened and closed his fists like sunbursts with each word. I frantically told him to stop painting my house orange. My heart was beating irregularly. The kids were horrified. My son thought our house looked like a package of Skittles and declared he wouldn’t live in an orange house. I kept circling the property trying to find the right angle that would give me hope that I didn’t make a nuclear-orange blunder.

Always one to be solution-focused, I called my contractor and told him of my mistake and then loaded up my most color-coordinated child in the minivan and headed off to find a way out of this orange morass. Our neighborhood hardware store has an interactive program that gives a mockup of colors on a digital model house. We pored over color pairings that could bring our little piece of the world back into homeostasis, then landed on Holly Glen with Purity White trim.

Feeling like superheroes, we had two test quarts made up and headed home. Within 24 hours, the exterior of our house flipped to the opposite side of the color wheel and all evidence of the orange was gone, except for the gravel in my garden path, where the paint-spraying hose broke. I did, however, keep the neon-green sheds and painted the front porch swing the same color.