Well...black IS my favourite colour

I’m either a genius or an idiot.

I haven’t quite figured out which one yet but I’ll know after a couple of weeks. That’s when the getting-used-to-it phase should have run its course.

The thing I’ll be getting used to is the bookshelf in our living room. The one we’ve just painted.

Black.

I don’t hate it, but I can’t decide yet if I love it.

For the past 14 years the bookshelf has been white. And we’re not talking a little bookshelf. It’s a built-in that covers two thirds of a wall and runs from the floor to the ceiling, except that our ceiling is vaulted so there’s about four feet of clearance over it.

After all this time I was really growing tired of the white and decided I wanted to go with something totally opposite.

So the opposite of light is dark. And you can’t get much darker than black.

Actually the colour I was going for was more of a brownish black, or a blackish brown, but trying to translate the image inside my head to the person mixing paint at the hardware store didn’t work. So rather than risking a purplish-brownish-blackish outcome I told my husband let’s simplify things and just go black.

But not a dull black, or a dark black, or a shiny black…sort of a medium black. He brought home a paint chip, I okayed it, and the first coat of paint went on.

It wasn’t until three days later that I turned over the paint chip to see that the colour we had chosen is called ‘Black Cat.’

Good thing I’m not superstitious.

When we first built our house back in the mid-1990s, we had pretty much given ourselves a blank canvas. We had painted everything white – the walls, the ceilings, the wood mouldings. Little by little we started adding colour and I remember years back how excited I was that we were finally going to paint the living room now that I had finally decided on a new colour.

One day a family member was over when I exclaimed, “I can’t wait to paint this room. I am soooo sick of white!” “What colour are you going to paint it?” she asked. “Beige,” was my answer.

Yeah, that’s me, a real risk taker. From white to beige.

So you can just imagine going from white to black. Maybe I should have gone in increments and started out with grey.

The other night I’m sitting on the couch, staring at the bookshelf for the third night in a row as part of my getting-used-to-it phase. The more I do this, the more I’m starting to like it. But my five-year-old, who must have sensed that I still wasn’t completely sure about our decision, starts waving his arms around in the air as if the ghost of Picasso had taken over him. “Maybe you could paint this part blackish and this part brownish,” he said, pointing to various shelves. “Or,” he added, “you could paint it camouflage, with green and grey and black and brown.”

All I could do was laugh.

His suggestion was so serious and sincere I couldn’t tell if he was a five-year-old kid who really likes camouflage, or if he was a five-year-old kid who thought his mother had made a really poor judgment in paint colour.

I may not be a genius, but he is.

For the record, though, I really don’t miss the white bookshelf. And I think I’m going to really like the black bookshelf…especially after we paint the living room walls again.

Dark beige works for me.