Much Ado About Nothing Much

About a year ago, I put up this post at Maraca: Paint My Door. Some of you may remember. I had inherited an ugly metal front door that had been slathered with a bad shade of flat, pink paint. Clearly, something had to be done about that.

Given that the economy hit the fan at the same time we closed on the house, "something" did not include a fancy new door. That left paint. And for most people, that would have meant a one-day project.

I, however, am not most people. My talent for procrastination is so spectacular that I can expand a simple project into an emotional event lasting a whole. Freaking. Year. Don't believe it? Watch me:

For starters, there was the matter of choosing a color. The siding is beige, so anything goes. Red is nice. I had a dark red door on the last house, and it looked great. Of course, before it was red it was a dark gray-blue, and I got a lot of compliments on that color. But ... How about a nice pine green? Never had a green door before, and it kind of goes with the whole back-to-nature thing out here. So... red or green? Green or red? And what SHADE of green or red? There were dozens of them. Dozens, I tell you.

Which is where last year's blog post came in. I couldn't decide, so I had my blogger friends pick. They went with red. Of course, posting it as a Ruby Tuesday entry probably skewed the results, but so be it. However, by that time it was too cold to paint. So I waited for spring.

By spring, I had begun to consider navy blue. And dark gray. And the shade of red I liked last year wasn't quite ringing my chimes anymore. Summer came and went.

And then the holidays were here. And that damn door was still pink.

Until last weekend. Crossing the grocery store parking lot, I spotted a fallen leaf that was exactly, perfectly, absolutely the right red: bright enough to be lively, but dark enough to be stately; saturated, glowing, the color of ripe berries in sunlight. Ignoring the sidelong looks of my fellow shoppers, I scooped up the leaf and squirreled it away in my wallet. Back home, I sealed it in a baggie and put it in the refrigerator. The hard part was over.

Or so I thought. I carried that leaf all over town, store to store, running in and out with paint chips to compare them in daylight. Could not match it. Just could not. What seemed perfect in one light was completely different in another. In the end, the shade I wanted was in between two chips, so I ended up with two cans of paint, intending to mix them together.

It took me another 20 minutes to decide on a brush: A good one, to do a nice job? A disposable one, since I'll never get all this red paint out of it? I went with a cheap brush that still felt nice.

Back home again, I couldn't figure out why it had been so important to me to match that leaf. I wasn't going to be able to do it anyway, so I just went with the darker can of paint.

And finally, finally, finally I actually painted the door. It's red. It's not the perfect shade, but it beats the hell out of that pink.

At least, I think it does. It was dark when we put the door back up, and since it's dark when I leave and dark when I come back every day, I haven't actually seen it in the daylight. I'll take a picture this weekend and let you know.

Now. About the hardware. Leave it for now or replace it? Basic builder stuff or something upscale? Pewter or bronze ...