Closer to Gold
CHAPTER 7
The aspens outside my window are gold again. Not every last one, there's still green hanging on outside a few of the windows, but most of them have turned, and that's the color this house was named for, right back where it was a year ago.
Getting the house itself to wear it has taken two tries.
The first one was Marblehead Gold. On the swatch, held up against the house, it read as close as anything I'd found to that aspen gold. On the window, first couple of strokes in, I knew. Way more pastel than gold. Buttery. Much more like an Easter egg than a gold miner's house.
So I stopped, and I went looking again.
This round I tested historic colors. One of them, Fields of Gold, is now on all three sides of the bay window.
I like it. A lot more than the butter yellow. I'm not fully sure yet, though. It might need to go a little more brown before it's right. So I'm going to live with it. A few hours, a few days, whatever it takes, before I decide whether it goes on every window in this house.
What I wasn't willing to do this time was play it safe. I didn't want a typical house color, a neutral gold, something house paint friendly. There are wildly colored houses all over this town, and that's what makes Leadville so unique and so cool. So I went bold. If I'm doing gold, I want it to be THE gold house.
What I'm chasing still has a name, and it's OLD HOUSE GOLD. Probably my favorite phrase in this whole renovation. A golden ochre. A warm historic yellow. A sun warmed mustard. Not beige. Not a taupe gold. Not antique brass brown. Not yellow yellow. I'll know it when I see it, and this one is the closest I've come.
A sample is just a sample. Full stop. You can hold it up against everything it's going to live next to and think you've got it, and then it goes on the actual surface and tells you something else entirely. That's exactly what testing a color is for, and it's exactly why I'm not calling this decided yet.
Design is a process, almost always. And paint is the most forgiving, easiest, cheapest part of this whole house to change. So don't be afraid to change it. I wasn't happy with the first one, I stopped, and trying the second one was easy and inexpensive.
I'm doing this on the old windows for a reason. The new windows come in next year, so I get to live with this color first, before I commit to something much more costly.
Still gold outside the window, mostly. Getting closer on the house.
