Over the years, I painted every inch of my home to match my family’s personality and my own whimsical nature. One of my friends once proclaimed with a slight tone of horror that my house felt like a ride at Disneyland. I was elated by the comment and thanked her profusely. Another friend once warned her children not to stand still for too long in Mrs. Gettleman’s home for fear that I might pull out a palette and paint them.
We replaced the pale wooden planks in the kitchen with aquamarine concrete floors and added a river rock “stream” running all the way from the courtyard to the pool. The tasteful terra cotta plant pots were tinged with bright primary colors. I crafted mosaics throughout the house and hung curtains made out of scuba wetsuit scraps in my office. I even did the unthinkable and painted vibrant blue and white stripes over the kitchen cabinets which had languished for years in a maple au naturel state of ordinary.
One by one visitors and guests proclaimed that I would never be able to sell my home, that I had destroyed the typical Tuscan tone of my tasteful and elegant living space. But more often than not, their shock and dismay were replaced with delight and determination to color and style their own homes with their own sense of childlike wonder and unique personalities.
At first, most people’s reaction reminded me of Mr. Pumbean’s critics in the 1977 children’s book The Big Orange Splot, (whose character, Mr. Plumbean, lives on a neat street where all the houses look the same, except his). “Plumbean has popped his cork, flipped his wig, blown his stack, and dropped his stopper.” But after a while, a few glasses of lemonade and some soul-searching conversation, everyone who left vowed to live differently, and one by one my neighbors and friends set about to changing their own homes to fit their dreams.
The time has come to put my creativity to the test. We’re selling our home and have refused to mute its personality and dull its vibrant character. A rather conservative interior designer recently toured our home and looked as if she might collapse in panic as she turned the corner from the maize and azure living room into the ocean blue and agate of the kitchen. My realtor revived her by suggesting she duck down the street to the perfectly plain, cookie-cutter house for sale a few doors down.
I’m proud of my home. It has been my creative canvas for 15 years. We still have the fancy appliances, state-of-the-art technology and luxury comforts of modern living. But we have something more than that, and hopefully, there’s someone out there who will appreciate our unique personality and quirky sense of expression.
