Did y’all ever see Pleasantville? The movie with Reese Witherspoon and Toby Maguire? An amusing utopian or rather dystopian movie where two teenagers fall into a “perfect world” in a black and white TV show. They rather quickly begin to corrupt the new world around them and as they do it turns to color. The first notable coloring is when a fire begins and they call the fire department who doesn’t know how to fight a fire (because they never have had a fire before) so he gets them to come by telling them there’s a cat in a tree. The teenagers go to the library and find the books are empty, but when they explain the books they fill in and turn to color.
Anyway, I was reminded of this movie while sitting here looking at homes on Zillow. I bet that’s not where you thought I was going to take that, was it? But these grey scale homes on the market have been getting me down for far too long. All the flipped homes that continue to be punched out of the assembly line of flips. Grey vinyl planked floors, grey cabinets, grey walls, painted brick, painted tiles. But home flippers, if you’re here, why grey? Why do you paint all the brick? Why do you use the same vinyl floors in every single house? I truly do not care what people do in their own homes, if you are actually putting it in your OWN home that you intend to live in, but if you are going to flip take a baby risk and flip with a cream color for goodness sake.
I want you to picture a 1925 Tudor Revival, it looks right out of a fairytale. Outside: white brick with vines, steep pitched asymmetrical roof line, tall chimneys, arched wooden doors. The inside: wooden floors, built-in cabinets in the dining room and mud room, lots of natural light doesn’t it sound picturesque? Well something felt off about it… and then it hit me… it’s grey. It’s all grey! Why did it take me so long to see how much grey was in this house? Well, the majority of the floors in the house are a orangey wood, yes too orange for modern buyers, and my first scroll through of the pictures I saw that the floors in the bedroom had large gouges in them. Yikes, I wondered what’s wrong with this house? And then I got to the kitchen and it had been “updated” so I’m betting you know exactly what I saw. Grey vinyl plank floors, cabinets had been painted a shade that matched the floors… and the baseboards a hue to match the cabinets. “Ugh fine, it’s the only room they attempted before they gave up” I thought… then I went back to the first pictures and realized nope… it is all grey. Grey walls, door, trim, windows, even the dang tiles in the bathroom were PAINTED grey. Now why would I think that they had painted the tiles? That’s extreme, right? Oh but the paint was already damaged and behind it a green shower. I’m not saying that green is a great tile color or that you have to deal with it in your home if you don’t like it but WHY IS IT ALL GREY? They did give up though, its back on the market with only 1 room containing the dreaded vinyl floors. Though the gouges in the real wood floors lead me to believe that the vinyl couldn’t have been placed on top of it everywhere and there may be real damage to the house… I hope someone who loves older homes buys this one.
A very un-isolated incident I am sure you are aware, and when my grandma’s house was sold a few years ago and though in my mind (and that of all my cousins) it was perfect, so full of memories. Christmases with 13 stockings lining the stairs and a tree we chopped down in the pasture in the living room. Birthdays with fudge icing, a recliner in the garage that we shelled pecans in, and the dining room with the prism on the fan that lit up the room each day. I can still admit it needed a lot of love, it was a great home but the stairs were so steep your thighs burned walking up them. The bathrooms had no outlets, weird division, and even weirder colors of toilets. While the house was huge, the kitchen was weirdly small and the cabinet color even my Grandma didn’t like (she told me a story about going out of town, Papa said he was going to stain the cabinets and she told him not to… she came home to it changed.) I had always dreamed of ways I would fix up the house, I’d remove the wall between the formal dining and the kitchen and make the kitchen nice and big + add a pantry. I would have changed the stairs so that they swooped so they would not be near as steep. I would have changed the back entrance into a mudroom, added a deck off the sunroom with french doors leading out, and fixed the bathrooms. I had 20+ years of ideas of how I would bring that place to life for a modern family. So imagine my surprise when Grandma’s house came on the market and I got to see the work that was put in so quickly after saying goodbye to it.
I scrolled the pictures of my childhood home and found the house is pretty good shape. They had made big changes to the layout of the 1st floor, fixed the bathrooms, added the doors to the sunroom that were needed. They had renovated the kitchen, owner’s suite, created a mudroom, and painted the fireplace brick. All in all they did a good job with my grandma’s house, they put love into my home that was needed (including the foundation and fixing the plumbing) so I am grateful to them for keeping it a home. However, the only unforgivable thing they did when modifying the floorpan they had to choose new flooring (originally 3 types of flooring) and they picked the stupid GREY floors.
What kind of mischief do we have to be a part of to get our homes to not be Pleasantvilled anymore? I will volunteer to burn a bush in the front of every home on the market if it will mean that we can avoid anymore of the grey vinyl floors.
The Wordy Over Thinker 