A Color Match

Any orange would not do. If is was too bright, it would overpower the tiles and make them look drab. If it was too dark it would make the room feel heavy and gloomy. But too light and it would come out looking like peach, right?

What were we to do? Exactly this kind of questioning accompanied our thinking as F and I tried to come up with a solution to a new living room, while keeping existing flooring.

The house came with groovy tiling. At first we just about hated it but finances kept us from ripping it up like we did for the kitchen. After all, the endless spending had to stop somewhere. We decided to embrace the pattern and color choices instead. However, getting a suitable color to go with it proved to be a challenge.

The sofa and wood furniture were easy: go with brown fabric and dark wood. On the other hand, the wall was the battlefield. I didn't want all white which is such a plain solution that would look horrible with the tiles, as I had seen when I visited the house with the real estate agent. F and I agreed that an orange wall or area could be the solution, but then we ran into all those questions about which color of orange.

Additionally frustrating are color memory and sample factors. Memory alone does not help when choosing a paint color for a delicate home remodelling situation while physically choosing it in a hardware store. You can't remember the nuances of tone and hue of your original. Bringing a digital photo, in the camera or printed, does not really help either because the photo process changes the colors too much for them to be reliable color samples. In my case, the camera adds a blue tinge to everything so the tiling colors don't seem as warm as they are in reality. In the end, I painted myself a true color copy of the tiles which I took to the store to select the paint. I am lucky enough to have painted for most of my life and know how to copy exact colors, but this would be an almost impossible feat for some people.


So then I got to the point of checking potential oranges to match against my watercolor tile sample. Since the colors from the sample book were 0.5 cm tall and 2 cm wide, it added to the challenge. I had to imagine that tiny spec of color from the book projected 2.5 m high and on 2 walls! After an hour of looking, making a list of semi-finalist oranges until I got to the finalists which were 2 colori di arancione, I ordered my 1 liter sample buckets of each and went to the new house (in the pouring rain) to paint some big swatches of the colors directly onto the wall, for better effect. I was doing this the night before I was leaving for 2 weeks in the US, in which the painter would be completely painting the new house in Padua. I had to instruct him on what color to buy before leaving and I couldn't trust F to do. I let the paint dry overnight and F drove me by the new house on the way to the airport so we could look at the dried paint color and make a decision together. The softer orange hue was the winner.

Peach was it. Luckily, it doesn't feel like peach in the context of the final furnished room.

Here are some other computer-generated color combinations I experimented with along the way.





The final paint job with a custom-made sofa and retro crystal and metal coffee table. Model is Satchmo, as usual.

Over the Top in Newness

I've never had so many new things at once.

I moved into a house last month that my husband and I bought, after 6 years of renting fully furnished apartments. In Italy, the rentals normally come with furniture; yet once you buy, you need to get EVERYTHING from normal furniture such as sofas and beds to bathroom sets, light fixtures, curtains, rods and all appliances.

We could have used the old kitchen, from the former tenants, but my last post showed you why that was not an option for us.

So we embarqued on a crazy shopping spree. Trying to critically decide on best value for your money on every single item needed in a new house, all at the same time, was torture. Washing machines, dishwashers, oven, lights, sofas, beds, mattresses, wardrobes and more: all purchased in 30 days or less.

Eventually everything was bought and installed and assembled, some by us, and some by professionals. But then we had to learn how to use all the stuff! The appliances had strange light sequences and odd cycles that we weren't familiar with. For example, the washing machine basically gets "turned on" twice, by 2 separate buttons.

In addition, we weren't very experienced with all of these contraptions. F had never had a dishwasher in his tiny house while growing up in Venice, and I hadn't used one seriously since I left the States in 1993. The technology has changed. The products and instructions are different. We were reading manuals and getting depressed at night because we would discover we didn't have certain materials to allow us to use the machines properly, especially for the first time: e.g. special dishwasher salt. So then another day or two would go by and we still didn't know if the machines even worked! That's what you get for only being able to read manuals after the shops close at 8 p.m., after a long day of work.

Then there is the oven mystery: why is there an "extra" metal piece when the oven has supposedly been put together and installed? It seems to work fine without this certain piece but we should probably use it anyway. The problem is that it probably needs to go in the very back of the oven, which is now well sealed off by cabinets and floorboards.

The complications of newness made me think about how seemingly different this experience would have been in the US. My husband and I would have met and moved in together with our old furniture from previous apartments, some dating back to the first move while in college which included rummaging through the second-hand stores and Salvation Army. We would have taken the good old stuff and chosen to buy only certain new things based on finances, space and necessity. Here, it feels like all or nothing. Before I owned nothing. Now I own everything. And it's all new!

Funny thing is that most Italians gut their newly-acquired property even more than we did, only focusing on the kitchen and a few fixtures in the bathroom. Italians typically walk into completely, spankin' new digs with fresh flooring everywhere, new wood, new doors, often new walls and plaster and paint, not to mention brand new furniture, even when their building may be over 300 years old! They usually take 6 months to 2 years to accomplish this mission. Now much of this can happen because so many Italians never rent property. They go from their family's house to their fancy remodelled house, maybe just after coming back from their honeymoon. Often both sides of the family pitch in to help with the high costs and the rest was saved by the couple by years of not renting while working. It's all very traditional and formal, in many ways.


In the end, we have accepted much of the "old" house elements like groovy '70s tiling for most of the flooring (will display soon) but changed what bothered us most, while also being forced to buy all our furniture at once. You could say we did our move and remodelling with a mixture of Italian and American mentality.

Debut of the New Kitchen

The kitchen was the largest project to improve our new house, built in 1971, before moving in. Since we thought both the old kitchen in-place and the tiles were awful, we gutted it all.

We started with this in February:



After the first phase of gutting all the wall and floor tiling:



Then the new tiles were installed after a week: white for the walls and grey for the floor:



Model: Satchmo

Finally the black and steel kitchen set was installed:



The best part about the remodelled kitchen is that it includes a dishwasher. It took me about 10 years to get one since all my other apartment situations were too small to accomodate one or I lived with people, mostly students, who were not interested in installing a dishwasher. No one cooked enough to feel the need for it.

The dishwasher is such a great appliance! So many precious minutes of evening time can now be spent in a different activity, other than doing the dishes. I have a new appreciation for this machine which helped in the women's liberation movement.

Don't get me wrong. My husband did the dishes too, but not as often as me.

We are enjoying cooking in a new and modern way in our new kitchen.

New House Progress

The work is underway on the new house. The kitchen has been gutted. Tiles have been ordered. They will be laid next week. Some light bulbs have been installed to have some sort of temporary illumination for evening visits to the property. We got a quote for changing the locks, and then the fabbro never called back to do the work. In the end, we thought it would be better to change the locks once the workmen have all had their access. A sofa has been ordered which will be custom-made for us and should be ready in a month. The original painter backed out since he was more of a friend who wanted to help and pick up some money than a professional and the walls, full of holes from former tenants, proved complicated. So now we are having the tile men move on to do the paint job next, since they also offer painting services and are doing a good job so far.

The interesting and quirky part to this new house is that we will have hardly anything done by Italians. The kitchen work and painting will be the product of Romanian sweat. The sofa is being made by Albanians. Most of our furniture will probably be Swedish design from IKEA. Only the locks and lights will be done at the hands of Italians. So much for Italian design and quality. Either we can't afford it or don't like it.

First Week with a New House

Here goes this week's list, dedicated to everything my husband and I have to do right now, since we have a "new" old house to make our own:

_change residency to new comune
_update residency for everything: bank, car license, business, permesso di soggiorno, etc.
_open utilities accounts for electricity, water, trash
_print new name tags for mailbox and main door
_buy fire insurance (according to Italian law) linked to mortgage
_change 4 locks
_call the building super and introduce myself
_get quotes for a painter
_get quotes for tile layer (is that how we say it in English?)
_get quotes for cleaning wood flooring in bedrooms
_start doing minor electrical work
_buy tiles
_decide on and order a sofa (since most require 60 days for delivery)
_get some light bulbs attached to the wires since there are absolutely no light sources in the house

So do you get the idea that I am slightly stressed out?

Bear in mind that we are both working full time at the moment and I am planning a big trip to the US that starts in 3 weeks. Also my husband has a rock band album being released in a month, which needs proper promotion, and that is partly done by the band members themselves.

It's fantastic to know that we have our own property. I still can't believe it after over a decade of renting, in my case. I can actually paint the walls the way I like them. However, there is a side effect: too much to do too fast.