pearl finish

ok, so i'll admit that i am not a big fan of people airing their dirty laundry in public, but the point of this blog, for me, is part therapeutic, and most of you are my friends and family who have heard this all from me before, so i feel i would be remiss to leave out the biggest and hopefully last blow out fight i had early on with my sweet husband over a paint color. actually, a paint finish to be exact.
being a neurotic new yorker, i had mailed ahead paint chip reference colors for each room (wall & trim) of our new apt in Istanbul, complete with inspiration tear sheets and finish samples, instructing my husband to paint the apt or have it painted before my arrival, so it would be sufficiently aired out, imagining there were probably no low VOC or solvent-free organic paints there. I knew it was a bad sign when he called saying that he had to go to a few paint stores to find the paint finishes I had specified, saying that the first store he went to did not even know about finishes at all. This sounded worrisome, and somewhat inconceivable to me, coming from a world where redecorating is a sport and national past-time and everyone is an amateur architect. sharing the passion, i have renovated past houses and apartments and would go to all the design shows in the spring, like the ICFF, architectural digest, brooklyn design, etc. i naively thought that there would be a version of home depot where they could scan the paint chips i sent & computer match & mix the color, but i was only half right. they have bauhaus (the origin of the name i had to explain to my husband) which is their DIY home project store, but at their small paint dept you must choose a color from 2 small fans of color ranges. and they don't have paint chips that you can take home to check with the room lighting, in fact you have to pay for paint stirrers.
so everything started to go very wrong when my husband asked them for "pearl" finish instead of matching to the finish sample that the US manufacturer called "pearl" but was actually just a very slightly higher gloss version of eggshell, but not yet sateen. so in addition to the colors being not very close, the finish was not even pearl, it was metallic.
unaware of any of this and having been told that his father had helped him paint, i entered the apartment in anticipation and before the paint colors and finishes had registered, i immediately noticed that the apt was much smaller than i remembered. which would not normally be such of a concern, except that all my belongings were on their way in a container ship crossing the Atlantic, and all i could think was that maybe half of it would fit. not only was the apt smaller than my apt in nyc, but it was painfully lacking any closets. where were the built in closets? i wondered as my spatial abilities frantically tried to configure how the movers would even be able to fit all the boxes into the apt.
already lost in panic about my impending shipment, the shine of the metallic walls caught my eye. "hmm, it looks a little shiny", i said weakly, as i noticed that the trim was not painted, nor the baseboards. and the kitchen walls, that i had instructed him in an act of faith, to pick a light blue color from the glass wall tiles to match to, were strangely a slightly lighter shade of the metallic blue of the living room. "oh, i just added some white to the living room color," my husband casually told me. I basically had to stop looking because the more closely I looked the more I found, such as swipes of paint on the door frames and fixtures from not removing them or taping as I had requested.
so after his parents came over to have dinner in our unfurnished apt, sitting on the floor around their borrowed coffee table, they asked how i liked the paint colors. I told them they were a mistake and belonged on a car, and that i planned to repaint, all of which my husband refused to translate. so i tried to convey the message in my limited Turkish, and they all looked at me like i had 3 heads, especially his father, who had helped, and seemed amazed that i would want to undo his hard work. it was beyond their comprehension that i could dislike it so much to want to repaint. i think people here are more used to living with their mistakes.
so when i brought up the subject again with my husband, because i needed him to drive me to bauhaus to buy new paint, he said flat out, "you are not repainting," and then refused to discuss it further after i tried to protest. after being told that i made a big deal out of everything, i emailed all my friends for a reality check - was i crazy? but they all confirmed, without even seeing it and without hesistation, that they would of course repaint as well. later after the dust settled, fueled with conviction, we had to have a discussion about what was ok and not ok. such as, it is not ok to tell me that i can't do something. and that it is ok to say that you don't want me to, and give an explanation why. all of which made me realize that we were coming from 2 very different cultural backgrounds, which at the moment were clashing head on.
we are all products of our home environments, and i realized that his reaction was very similar to his father's that i had witnessed before. some reprogramming was in order here, and suffice it to say that the key to harmony is compromise. we repainted the living room, after hours of having to sand off the old paint, and i am living with the main room & kitchen. sometimes is it just too exhausting to be a perfectionist, especially when you have to fight the battle alone.