It has been thirteen years since my house was first painted and the nice reddish stain had gone so dirty-brown in places. I knew the time had come to fix it up.

Being a handy guy, I decided to tackle the job myself and after asking around about the best stain to use. I went about the task of picking up samples at the store.

At the 'big box' store where Gigi's truck stop used to be, I grabbed some of those little paper strips with some reasonable colors and brought them home to Mrs. Anthony.

That was my first mistake.

Mrs. A knows that I love her very much, but because she has the color sense of a Dale Chihuly with two eye patches, I knew I'd better narrow down the choices in advance. I presented her the samples with the nice earthtones and she immediately said, "These are awful!"

Back to the store I went and this time I selected a folder full of choices, three pages of reds, greens, blues, grays and yellows. This time she took out her pencil and began circling possible candidates, connecting each circle with a squiggly line to another circle. I tried to interject things like "Honey, you need to stay in the same tone category," and "Blues and reds tend to clash, sweety," along with my own circles and connecting lines.

Back at the paint store, I showed the chart to the kid behind the mixing computer. With the squiggles, intersecting lines and multiple circles, it looked like the playbook from the Seahawks worst season ever.

I had to make a decision, so I stubbed my finger down on one in the middle and the kid started mixing. He finished them up and gave me the two five gallon jugs with an odd smirk, saying, "Good luck to ya'."

Back home again, I set up the tarps and the paint sprayer and put a coat of the stuff on the big high wall in the back. I was just about finished when my neighbors, Bill and Cheryl came home.

Bill nearly fell into his hot tub, apparently too numb to speak, but Cheryl was diplomatic. "Oh...my, that must be the primer coat, right?"

I stood back and looked at the color and gasped. It was sort of a yellowish-orange, what the fancy paint name people might call, "Dehydrated Pumpkin."

I quickly agreed with Cheryl about it being the first coat (thank you Cheryl) and they seemed satisfied. Now I had to explain it to Mrs. A.

She drove in, came around the corner and was surprisingly calm,

"What did you do to the house?"

I ushered her back into the garage where we could fight more privately and after a few short, heated exchanges, I made my way back to the paint store with the half-full paint buckets.

The smirky kid was not there, but another teenager willingly took my remaining paint to try to create something a bit less ghastly. She began by adding blacks and browns and each time, she would smooge a small amount of the result on some paper so I could see it.

By the time she had completed five or ten repeat injections of all manner of colors, we had a Jackson Pollock in front of us and no more choices.

She had given it her best shot, and so I brought the stuff home and sprayed a second coat. Now the color was not so jarring, but still looked a bit like "Three Day Old Cream of Squash."

Mrs. Anthony came home, and as I took her around the back of the house in dread, I was surprised instead.

Luckily, as the stain dried, it had gotten considerably darker, taking on a more sedate, tannish color.

"Looks nice," she said, and though it is still a little unusual as a house paint color, I'm getting used to it.

And though I have apparently dodged the bullet of having to live in the travel trailer for a while, I still have the rest of the house to paint. Anybody out there with a strong stomach and good with a paintbrush?