Dare to Decorate

Two style-challenged homeowners go boldly where they've never gone before

Lynn Bowen Walker

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To be honest, the whole idea of redecorating unnerves me.

My husband and I are an unlikely decorating match to begin with. I brought color to our union: bright orange and neon green, to be exact, a color combination I can explain only by saying I was the last girl scout to choose my fabric on patchwork pillow-making day, and it seemed to me after investing so much time in hand sewing, I was committed.

Mark brought to our marriage the sophisticated taste and affluence of your typical college man: a basketball hoop laundry hamper, slatted wooden crates that grocery stores use to sell lugs of fruit and a collection of dark wooden objects decoupaged with American eagles that I can classify only as "paperweights."

A family therapist might see the merging of our two childhood bedroom sets as an abstract metaphor for the oneness of marriage.

Whatever.

All I know is that for the past 17 years our entire decorating strategy has revolved around ditching the most offensive of the cast-offs that served as our dowries, including the orange fish net that once draped artfully across the living room wall and the brown canvas rocker that swallowed fannies the way the Venus flytrap sucks up flies.

Somehow the massive, mud-colored, faux-wood dressers in our bedroom have managed to escape being overthrown. For some reason (I remember now, money) they've remained, flanking our bed like sentries.

But their days are numbered. The deal was clinched after a recent visit from some over-zealous children who like to jump. We looked at our cockeyed bed frame and realized it had hosted its last Pee-Wee Olympics. While we were at it, it seemed we might as well junk the clunky dressers too and buy something that didn't scream to be accessorized with black velvet Elvis paintings.

Since it's taken all these years simply to arrive at an uninspired, nondescript middle ground we could both live with, I was not approaching redecorating with high hopes. It would be lovely to find a style that made both our hearts sing, but in the back of my mind I feared being overpowered by both my husband and some flashy style-monger salesman who'd be pushing gold brocade Louis XIV settees.

Plus it was hard to shake the nagging question: is decorating really practical, anyway? I have yet to see in the glossy decorating books even a hint of dirty laundry. And where do the owners of those rooms keep the 40-pound bag of dog food? Should you just color-coordinate the bag to match the linoleum? Better yet, just color-coordinate the dog? "I'd like a taupe dog, please, to match the great room. Low-pile, preferably," you could say brightly.

These were valid questions. But can you really debate a broken bed? Circumstances seemed to dictate that it was time to redecorate (or more to the point, to decorate in the first place). Not trusting our own instincts (after all, we've lived with this stuff for 17 years; surely any sense of good taste we once had is blunted), we trooped to the furniture store to snag a decorator to help us.

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Originally published in: Marriage Partnership, 1999, Spring

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