I think it’s indicative of how easily influenced our mood is when a room is painted. It has such a staggering influence over how I feel. A plain white room that has been left with bare walls since the builders put the house together really is a canvas left unpainted. I know most people wouldn’t paint a mural ON their walls, but a colour has the ability to evoke many feelings.
Painting is expensive, and unless you are willing to pay people to do it, it is a helluva labour too. There may be priming, taping doorknobs, ceilings and floorboards, laying drop sheets, rolling layer after layer until all the previous colour is covered. And the inevitable panicked effort at cleaning up mistakes before they set. But I really think it’s worth it. My room is painted a deep purple. It makes my small room feel a little smaller than when I first saw it, white and naked. But it also feels like a warm blanket around me, like when you make a tent out of your bed comforter and all you can see is what you’ve brought into the tent with you.
My mum and I recently painted my little sister’s formerly light pink room into a lime green (almost glow-in-the-dark) room. It has made her so happy. And truly, the room is so much more “seventh grade tomboy” than light pink with unicorn border could ever do.
I know that when I am a wife with a family and a home for my kids to grow up in, I want a light yellow kitchen, to evoke a home-sweet-home feeling. I would like my kids’ rooms to be a bright, primary (red yellow blue) or secondary (green orange purple) colour, to encourage creativity, vitality, and vivaciousness. I would like my dining room to be red, to reflect the cultured discussions that will surely take place over fancy dinners at my fabulous dinner parties. My own bedroom will be dark brown like chocolate, or maybe even a dark corral, so I can sleep in darkness on Sundays, and feel like I’m at home.
That’s what painted walls do for me. They make me feel at home because I chose the colours, I made the room what it is. They’re my own final trading spaces revealing a room that reflects how I want to feel in it.
White walls make me feel sad, at the lost potential for their owners to make a room sing.