Styrofoam Pink

by rosedeniz

The first coat of paint went on the walls of our bedroom last night, and well, how can I say this delicately?… it looks like pink insulation. It should be called Styrofoam Pink in the catalog. This little diagram below should explain pretty clearly: It’s been plaguing me all day. Of course, it is the first coat and you can see the beige below because the painter did not use a primer. So after another coat, it’ll be smooth and lovely, right? And once our dark furniture is in there, it’ll contrast in a nice way? Oh, and the painter accidentally started with turquoise in our bedroom, and as everybody knows (or should know), intensely pigmented colors are impossible to cover without a primer. So you can see a lovely smear of turquoise below my insulation pink bedroom wall. Which means I’m going to sandpaper the spot myself where he painted the turquoise and try to start from scratch.

Edges? I’ve had better moments than when I saw blotch after blotch of paint on the ceiling and on the doorframe. See, the thing is, the person we hired is a painter. He doesn’t bring brushes. He doesn’t buy the paint. He doesn’t clean the walls. He only paints. It is our job to sand, tape, and prime unless we tell him and supply him with the materials. So, it is our fault we didn’t give him painter’s tape to go around the edges. But he didn’t tell us we needed to give it to him in the first place. Any he didn’t tell us the roller we got is wrong for the walls, either. He painted the room first, and then told us. This is why my brain hurts right now. I can’t quite figure out how it was supposed to happen.


The most positive thing about the pink walls so far is that while searching for a image of pink insulation, I was brought to the work of Kim Beck, above, who was written about in Minutia, and whose work I love. Would I set up my bedroom in her installation, though? Probably not. Will be thinking about either toning down the pink with some white or crossing my fingers that the gorgeous warm pink we picked from 1,001 colors will emerge once the second coat is up.

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