This is not going to be a year in review entry. I’ll save that for my journal anniversary in May (or April, depending on when I decide to celebrate). This is not going to be a New Year’s resolutions entry. That will come when my personal goal year ends in March. This is not going to be another “I’m sick; woe is me” entry. Yes, I’m still sick, but even I’m tired of hearing myself moan about it. What this is going to be is an inspirational story of hard choices made. In these waning hours of 2002, Mr. Karen and I pulled together and achieved a feat of decision making the likes of which has never been seen before in this household. In less than an hour, with no tears and very little bad language, we picked paint colors for not one, not two, but three rooms of our home.

For the bedroom, we settled on Sundance, a warm orange that goes with the hardwood floor and the quilt I made for the bed. Yes, I realize many people pick a wall color they like and then coordinate the bed covering with the walls. Not going to happen here. Given the acreage required to cover a king-sized mattress and the list of other projects I want to do, it will be a really, really long time before I get around to making us another quilt for our bed, so the colors we’ve got on it now are the colors we’re going to have. Besides, we picked the quilt colors—purples and oranges and yellows—because we liked them, so we should like a wall color that coordinates.

For the guest bedroom, we went with Bewitching Blue, which is, not surprisingly, blue, a cool, clear blue, much cleaner than the greenish grayish pastel blue that’s on the walls now. Again, the bed linens were the deciding factor. My first quilt lives in this room, and it’s dominated by blues. It doesn’t quite go with the wall color now, but once we paint, it’ll have the perfect setting. I suppose we could have gone with one of the accent colors in the quilt instead of blue. The burgundy, maybe, but it’s really too small a room for burgundy walls, and light burgundy is pink, and a pink room doesn’t thrill me. I had a pink room when I was a little girl, but I don’t really want one now. Besides, we call this the “The Blue Room” when we talk about it, so keeping it that same hue will be less confusing.

For the office, also known as the baby’s room because it still features the Disney Babies decals and toy filled wallpaper border the prior residents had, we had a harder time. Mr. Karen wants to keep the wallpaper on the lower half of the walls, believing, and probably correctly so, that if we have to strip it off we’ll just keep thinking up excuses to not redo this room. I was somewhat slow to accept this idea. I dreamed of a complete change to warm brown walls (Bagel was its name-o), but eventually came around and focused on what color would complement the striped paper already in place. We looked at a lot of greens; the nicest ones were the dark shades, but that would unbalance the room, and the light shades we liked were too limey to go with the wallpaper, and the light shades that went with the wallpaper might as well have been called Institutional Green or Puke Green. We lost a little time when I had to recover from learning that Mr. Karen had never noticed how badly the existing wallpaper border clashed with the stripes we are planning on keeping. The uncoordinated colors have bothered me since before we moved into the house and HE NEVER NOTICED UNTIL TODAY? And I am making decorating decisions with this person? After reminding myself of all his good qualities, I was able to get back to looking at the paint chips. We ended up agreeing on Daffodil, a light yellow that was one of our second choices for the bedroom.

Not ones to bask for long in the glow of our accomplishment, we plan to venture out tomorrow and set the tone for 2003 by choosing blind colors for these same rooms. Yes, New Year’s Day at Home Depot. Try to contain your envy. As for when we’ll buy the paint and actually make the rooms the colors we chose, well, don’t hold your breath. We had to choose the paint so we could choose the blinds so we wouldn’t have to worry about giving the neighbors a free show, but once we’ve got the blinds, the rest of the project may very well settle into our normal home improvement pace, which would mean we might break out the paintbrushes sometime around 2010. But like I was surprised we picked three colors so quickly today, I’m hoping to be surprised by how soon we get to the painting.