Fruit Bowls and Hannibal Lecter

When we first moved to Smallville, we rented a house for about six months. We wanted to get a feel for the area and see where we might want to live--either in the big city of Columbia, or in one of the many Smallvilles that surround it.

We looked at many places and none seemed right.

Too old.

Too much work.

Too small.

Too far out.

Then our realtor brought me--because Carlos was working that day--to the house that would become ours. I had done a little bit of research on Smallville houses while we were still in Miami, and had actually seen the Realtor.com listing for this house. It seemed a nice fit; the right number of bedrooms; looked pretty among the trees. But the only pictures on the website were of the outside, so I assumed the inside was horrendous.

I put it out of my mind.

Then, after we'd moved to South Carolina, I began driving around the area looking at houses myself, and I stumbled across this one. It was just like the picture, and I thought someone lived here, so I didn't come down the driveway to peer in the windows.

Flash forward to finding a real estate agent, who began showing us properties. She brought me to this one, and I said I'd seen it on the web and wasn't sure, because there were no inside photos, only pictures of the yard the, apparently new, split-rail fence.

Then she took me inside, and instantly I felt like it was home. From the entry hall you could see across the living room and into the dining room; the house was empty because the owners had moved out almost nine months earlier. But as I looked into the kitchen from the front door, I could picture a breakfast table, and then I caught a flash of my Mom, sitting at that imaginary kitchen table and looking into our backyard--my Mom had passed away about a month before we bought the house, so I never got to tell her about it--but I was already thinking in terms of our house.

This was it.

Then the color hit me.

The previous owners had obviously never met a hideous color they didn't like. The dining room was....gulp....flesh-colored; I thought this might have been Hannibal Lecter's hideaway. The living room was pale blue above the chair rail, and some kind of scraped blue below. The kitchen was, and I kid you not, navy blue sponge paint.

Sponge. Paint. Navy. Blue.

The sunroom had a botanical wallpaper. The hallway was a darker version of the fleshy dining room. Entry hall and half-bath were an awful shade of red, that seemed to be trying to turn blue. There was a greenish-gray bedroom and a grayish-green bedroom--a subtle difference, but a difference nonetheless.

The master bedroom was navy blue below a wallpaper border. Yes! A wallpaper border. It was a light shade of blue above the border. And what can I say about the border itself. Pineapples and fruit bowls. Of course, considering that it was a couple of 'mo's looking at the house, perhaps a fruit bowl motif was a wise choice. (The day we signed on the house we came back to look at it as ours, and I tugged at the border; it came down very easily because it had been stapled into the wall.)

So, we bought the house, moved in, and began to paint.

Gone was the blue and brown kitchen; we replaced it with yellow and green.

Gone was the botanical wallpapered sunroom; it was butter and sky blue.

Gone was the fleshy dining room; it turned baby-blue stripes, until I decided it looked like a nursery, and then It turned dark green--the stripes will return.

The greenish-gray bedroom turned yellow and green.

We're debating the living room, hallway, office and master bedroom.

It's ongoing.