New colors

Sea Glass with a darker green accent for the fireplace. You can make out the yellow of the courtyard, too.

Judy and I just spent the last three weeks hosting a group of between six and eight Mexican workers who completed several projects, most notably, painting our entire house, inside and out. They were with us from 8:30 in the morning until 5:30-6:00 in the evening, Monday through Friday, with a half day on Saturday. They did great work, including painting behind several climbing plants, even two rose bushes. Every night, they cleaned up and moved things so we could resume using rooms as they finished.

Reverse angle, into the kitchen.

With all the strangers coming and going, our dog thought we had lost our collective minds, although after all this time, he has decided está bien. The workers really were quite considerate, but I have to say that three weeks of people wandering around our house was enough. Not to mention we’re out of Coca Cola. And Mexico is just starting to enforce social distancing and closures and the like, so the timing actually worked well.

Another accent wall down the hallway. The sunlight makes the walls seem mottled with yellow, but they are sea glass.

Our house was still the original beige we chose eight years ago, so it was time for some accent painting and a little color. And we had some salitre to fix. For those unfamiliar, salitre (literally saltpeter) is a peculiar problem here in Mexico. It’s a condition where moisture works its way up from the soil through the foundation and into the concrete and brick walls, leading to paint peeling and cracking. I’ve heard several unconvincing explanations for why it happens, and even more unconventional–if not nonsensical–treatments. In the end, you scrape, treat, seal and repaint when it bothers you enough.

Here the yellow really comes through!

Our pallete is a combination of sea glass with a darker green for accents. We added a red accent wall in one bathroom. The bedrooms are from the same general pallete, but are deep blue, purple and gray. For the outside we kept the same bright yellow (it also shows up inside on our terraza and the atrium), except we used a better quality of paint with a full primer base that should last longer. The tropical sun is murder on your exteriors here; we just repainted after only three years!

  • Purple
  • Blue
  • Gray
and the accent wall in the bathroom.

So we’ll begin social distancing in our freshly re-painted house. At least the colors are soothing!

4 thoughts on “New colors”

  2. Looks great, Pat. As a stay-at-home guy with a mutually created honey-do list, been working on the bedrooms. The Air and Space Museum–really, all SI museums–are shuttered. I happened to give the last tour at Udvar-Hazy. We left at 1730/the guards locked the doors.

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