Negotiations and love songs

It’s been almost a month since the boyfriend and I have actually been living together. It’s my first experience living in immorality and his second, and as we periodically glimpse each other across a room, through a maze of boxes or cowering in emotional apoplexy under any number of sinks in our vast, multi-bathroomed mansion, we often have the same internal response:

Holy shit. I live with that guy.

But it’s a good kind of holy shit. And while I always expected to experience endless giddiness when I finally moved in with The Rest Of My Life, the dominant emotion I feel now that I’m here is just calm. Simple, things-are-as-they-should-be calm.

That’s not to say it’s all peaches and beans in our vast, multi-bathroomed household. Far from it, in fact.

For instance, he put those spongy shelf liners in the kitchen cupboard where we store the cereal. I say it makes it harder to slide the cereal in and out, the way coated paperstock and veneered particleboard were meant to slide against each other. He says he likes it that way. I say he’s being grotesquely unreasonable.

And we’re still doing the what-color-should-we-paint-everything dance. We both love the green-on-green effect we achieved in the master bedroom, and we’ve agreed the adjoining bathroom will be a lighter shade of the same green with a darker shade as the unifying trim.

But every other room has been the subject of endless debate.

For instance: the guest bathroom, which is as small as Newt Gingrich’s integrity. I’ve always looked at wee tiny rooms as an opportunity to do big theatrical themes. Since the tile and the sink and the vanity in this bathroom are blinding white, I thought it would be fun to paint the walls an intense Mediterranean blue and maybe stencil the Latin conjugations of to wash around the tub as though they were carved in Greek letters. But the boyfriend likes every room in the house to flow together in one huggy-squeezy holistic whole. And the bright blue paint chips I taped next to the door frame gave him a visible rash every time he brushes his teeth.

So after a good hour of back-and-forth last night with about every paint strip from the Sherwin-Williams store, we’ve settled on what we both think will be lovely colors that all go:

Living room/sunroom/hallway (all essentially one room): three shades of a milky hot-cocoa brown
Guest bedroom: a purple-y gray with some kind or stencil (fleur-de-lis? something gayer?) along the ceiling in creams and dark violets
Guest bathroom: a light gray base coat covered by a dark khaki painted so you can see the gray peeking through vertical brush strokes (I’m hoping this bamboo/grasscloth effect will give the room a Zen/spa feel, and we can charge people $80 an hour to use it)
Yet to be even discussed: the dining room and the kitchen, though I’m sure we both have polar-opposite ideas for them as well

Our first houseguests come the weekend of April 20 to see me in my upcoming chorus show, and I’ve set that weekend as a soft deadline to at least have both bedrooms painted.

I wonder what color they’ll be by then.