I was chagrined at how far I’d apparently fallen. I once fancied myself a swashbuckling, untamed single guy, famed for above-average Friday night parties and unreasonably loud hobbies. But here I was, on my way to shop for bathroom window curtains. Not just any bathroom curtains, mind you – they had to be teal curtains, no less. Thirty minutes before, I didn’t know teal was even a color, much less a reason for leaving the house on a Saturday afternoon during college football season.
I did happen learn a few things through the curtain shopping experience, though. First, I discovered that there is apparently an appreciable difference between green curtains and teal curtains. They looked very much the same to my untrained male eye (teal looked a lot like green, but maybe a little bit less so). Second, I rapidly discovered that anyone (such as myself) who couldn’t truly appreciate the nuanced differences between teal and green had very little business designing a new room, so I gracefully bowed out of our bedroom remodeling planning enterprise, and opted instead to consult on the project only on the basis of whether I liked the design results our new design committee had produced. We had a design committee? Yes – apparently they just start following you around at the home store, like mosquitoes.
That leads me to the third revelation: it is evidently customary have more than one person help you design your new room or space. A furniture person hustled us through the maze of furniture upholstery options, followed shortly by the carpet person, who reluctantly yielded the floor to the paint expert after a brief eternity. At the end of this parade of expert knuckle-crackers, I was alarmed to discover a very sizable potential bill for all of this remodeling goodness piling up.
Fortunately, that situation quickly transitioned into the fourth lesson I learned on that fateful Saturday afternoon: it’s terrific to have a level-headed lady at the helm of the remodeling effort. She expertly herded then dispatched the various design experts, thanking them for their effort and enthusiasm, and proceeded to march us out of the store and straight back to our home computer, where she got busy ordering every item we had decided to buy online, saving us thousands. It turns out that teal really is beautiful after all, particularly when you only pay wholesale.