Because the owner of her apartment building is converting it to condos, Katie found a new apartment in Jersey City and will move in next weekend. In the meantime, she wanted to paint the place and I volunteered to help.
I stopped by her old place to pick up some preliminary supplies: white paint, brushes, pans, dropcloths, masking tape and brushes from the last time she painted, chairs and a stool (since we had no ladder for reaching the tops of the 10-foot-high walls in the new place), boom box and CDs, soap and towel, garbage bags, and pistachios, peanuts and Triscuits.
Katie’s new place, a third-floor walkup, is in a hipper and nicer neighborhood than her previous apartment, even though it’s less than 10 blocks away. It’s in a tall, handsome brick building a stone’s throw away from an upscale apartment complex that used to be the Dixon Pencil Factory, still sporting two 150-foot smokestacks. Built in the mid-1800’s, the stout, sprawling red-brick structure housed manufacturing operations for the yellow Dixon Ticonderoga pencil, friend of standardized test-takers and crossword puzzlers the world over.
This photo depicts only part of Katie’s living room with its richly colored hardwood floors. The front door is just to the left and part of the bricked-over fireplace is on the right. The windows are bordered with simple but distinctive Art Deco-style molding and the ledges extend in such a way that one can stand on a sill and do a full-body gyration-dance to the delight of strangers passing by outside. Or so I would imagine. Behind this view is the long kitchen leading to the bathroom and the bedroom.
After dropping off our stuff, we spent a really, really, really long time at the flagship location of Siperstein’s, New Jersey’s signature family-owned paint store chain. We bought more brushes and dropcloths, rollers, toxic paint-remover fluid and one of those metal keys that opens paint cans and beer bottles. And we bought paint. It took time for Katie to select the perfect colors. She shuffled the paint chips under the fluorescents (and near one of the store’s windowed doors to see what the colors would look like in natural light) until she found the perfect Dutch Boy ultralight orange for her living room and the perfect green for the bedroom. I’d call the orange “Albino Circus Peanut” and the green “1960s Light Green,” which is the color of the “Pistachio” KitchenAid mixer and at least one Vespa model I’ve seen.
I liked that Ralph Lauren Home has a whole line of paint, “Urban Loft,” that includes at least 19 hues named after Manhattan streets and neighborhoods. Beyond the one named Washington Square, which resembles New York University’s regal purple, I was stumped by the associations: a lavender Chelsea, creamy Tribeca, rust-red Village, and deep blue for both Hudson and Sullivan. Of course, the same copywriter has to assign names to 25 extremely similar shades of white, so I can understand why he would lose it and feverishly start randomizing names with colors.
As for Katie’s selections, when she arrived at the sales counter with the winning chips firmly in hand, she was informed that they didn’t have the bases to mix Ralph’s color. Oh, or the Dutch Boy color. In fact, two different guys squinted at the Ralph Lauren chip with “where’d you get this?” looks of confusion, as if Katie had handed them a Yu-Gi-Oh card and asked for two gallons. One of the guys eventually volunteered to try his hand at approximating the colors, and after appraising some hastily mixed tests smeared on litmus strip-sized pieces of paper, Katie approved the hand-mixed knockoffs. Ralph should not only fret over the clothing counterfeiters of Canal, but the alchemists at Siperstein’s as well.
We had just started with the trim in the bedroom when Kelly and Megan arrived. Painting is a long, thankless process, but we made it more fun listening to bad ’80s music on the boom box and cracking wise. Here, Kelly and Katie work over a wall with roller-brushes.
After we began to flag, Katie got the number for Lombardi’s and ordered sodas, beer and two big pizzas: one with mushrooms and onions, the other with breaded and fried chunks of eggplant on it and lots of garlic. Kelly and Megan bowed out after a few hours, and Katie and I finished around midnight, after an estimated three coats of paint. The room looks good and I don’t think we got too much paint on the carpet and the ceiling.