My bathroom tile is baby blue. Really. It looks like a hospital birthing room. Baby blue.
The walls are yellow. White trim, but yellow. And this is throughout the entire house.
Every time we move to another base, I catch myself looking at the housing and wondering, "Who came up with this? What were the choices? If this is what we've got, what was rejected?"
Now, I'm not complaining, really, just commenting. We chose to live on base this go-round because we were geographically separated from a base on our last duty station and I just missed being around military people. And in the nearly two years we've been here, base life has absolutely lived up to all the pluses we remembered and expected. The minuses, too, but that's to be expected.
Seriously, though, who picks the decorating schemes on base?
I remember when we were in base housing in they dying throes of Kelly Air Force Base... we had WHITE carpet! WHITE! My husband wore combat boots for a living! I'm going to presume that most of the husbands in the housing did, too. So who thought that white Berber carpet would be the best choice for housing? Needless to say, it did not survive it's sojourn with our family.
I've always harbored a secret wish to get hired on for that job. I'd get to pick the paint for the vacated houses, the tile, the carpet, the cabinetry... That would be so much fun! Baby blue tile? That's SO 1970s. I'd go with the Mediterranean mosaic look. Yellow walls? Nah, I saw a beautiful light brown/olive tone that would go perfectly with a creamy white for the baseboards. Of course, anyone with cool colored furniture would be S-O-L, but then again, it hides fingerprints well. And if other husbands are anything like my own, there are more big man hand prints than child sized ones on the walls.
And the carpet? Hmm, that takes some thinking. I wonder if they have anything with a decorative design of black bootprints on a Berber background? That would really help with the camouflage effect and keep the carpets in service longer.
On second thought, maybe this is why they never ask for my decorating inputs to begin with. That, and the fact that my brother describes my own decorating scheme as "early harem, with hippie beads."
But what else is it going to look like when your knick-knacks are all imported from Iraq, Korea, and Afghanistan?
