So this weekend, in a fit of lunacy, I painted part of the kitchen.

There are three walls where the hallway lets into the kitchen–it would normally have been two walls meeting in a corner, but in an effort to soften matters and make space, the corner has been truncated, leaving a narrow diagonal wall in place of said corner.

Bored and in the vicinity of Lowes, I picked up a sample can of a warm yellow called "Cantaloupe Smile" and did the narrow diagonal wall with it. It looked pretty good, but after two days of living with it, I decided it was too dark to do the entire kitchen in–I like intense colors, but without another strong color to play off it, it wasn’t quite gonna work. (There are solutions. They mostly involve painting all the cabinets, which I should be firmly talked out of. It may happen eventually, but not this year.) So I picked up a can of the next color in the swatch, which was "Whipped Apricot" (a much warmer, more buttery color than the name implies) and did the other two adjoining walls. Wet, it was a trifle insipid, but drying darkened it down a shade, and it’s a very good color.

It’s also a very cheese color. So now a chunk of the kitchen resembles a block of mild cheddar–or possibly an Edam–with a wedge carved off it. It still looks pretty good, though, and although I’d been thinking "accent wall" with the darker, because of the angle of the wall and the way the shadows fall, it’s nearly impossible to tell it’s a different color unless you know what to look for. It’s subtle.

Subtle is not something I manage often, except by accident, so it gets to stay for now.

It also has the effect of making a ten-year-old-builder-beige wall look much newer and sharper, which is half the battle right there, even if I have to re-paint and touch up some of the baseboard later.

I have some other amusing plans for some of the weirder little bits of architecture, but we’ll see how it goes…