It’s okay to be boring.

We just painted our new dining room.  It used to be a perfectly fine green — and I salute the Prior Occupants of our house, because it is hard to find a perfectly fine green.  Nevertheless, a green dining room is not our style, and it clashed with our stuff, even when our stuff was safely in the kitchen cabinets out of sight of the green walls of the dining room.  Now it is beige.

In general, I would say that we are not beige people.  The dining room of our old house was a fantastic orange, a Benjamin Moore shade called “Rust” that is, unfortunately, exactly the team color of the University of Texas at Austin’s football team.   We loved the orange living/dining room, nile green den, and harvest gold kitchen/breakfast room of our old house.  We specifically chose those colors to make our our old unremodeled 1960’s Ranch house feel au courant and not old-peopley — and it worked.  We painted it back to a neutral off-white in order to rent it, and *presto* it felt old fashioned again, and not like it had before — a refugee-house from the set of Mad Men.

I’m the type of person to put a lot of thought into choosing paint colors, so I covered large sections of the dining room wall with 1′ square patches of paint of various colors — shades of red and orange, a different green, even purple, and beige.  We liked the beige.  We both liked the beige.  We each, separately, liked the beige.

“Who are you and what have you done with my husband,” I said to Chris.

“The red seems — I don’t know.  Too much.  Like we’re trying too hard to be interesting.  And anyway, you hate beige.  Why did you pick up this sample in the first place?”

“I thought I should look at some beiges before I ruled it out.  It’s comfortable.”

“Comfortable is what I say about your ugly shoes and jeans that are too baggy in the butt.”  He is right, and I would know better than to wear those jeans out of the house, if only our new house had a full length mirror.  I’m wearing them right now, in fact.

Nevertheless, I feel comfortable with our new beige dining room.  It is okay not to be fabulous.