Green, We Need To Talk

We recently canned our plan to move into a bigger apartment, opting instead to redecorate our current, perfectly acceptable one bedroom and save some money. The apartment is located in one of those large high rises that's high on parquet flooring and low on character, but it's a well maintained building and we love our area of the city so it's worth sticking around.

We've been in the place for a few years and have created a decent decor (read: a few steps above your average undergrad apartment, a few steps below this), but we're getting to the point where our hand-me-down bookshelves are now being held up by the books inside them and our futon begs for mercy whenever one of us sits down on it with our full weight. There's definitely room for improvement.

The biggest problem, however, is the colour. Back in the day, when the walls were an ennui-inspiring dull cream, I put forth an argument for big colour. And boy did we get big. Our first attempt to paint the apartment (using the nightmare-causing shade 'Little Boy Blue') turned the place into the equivalent of a drained swimming pool. The paint wasn't even dry when I turned to T and said 'I can't do it. We've got to paint again'

With the terror of bright blue still fresh in our minds, we carefully picked out our next colour, a fresh looking green called 'Wind Surfer' (again, we probably should have known from the name). Well, replace 'fresh' with 'neon' and 'green' with 'lime green' and you'll have a pretty decent idea of the colour our apartment has been for the last two years. We were too exhausted to paint a third time and eventually got used to the brightness. I even grew to like it... sort of.

We put off painting for a long time thinking we might move, but now it's time to get out the rollers and take things down a notch. The only problem is that we can't figure out what colour to go with.

Blue is out. Forever.

Grey is too drab without any white trim to spruce it up.

Yellow is an option, but doesn't really jive with the other furniture and accessories we have in mind for the redecoration.

Red, orange, brown, purple... Too bright, not our thing, too bland, don't like it... So that leaves us with two basic options:

White (bright white... any beiges or creams would bring us too close to the original colour) or.... GREEN

T and I both still like green (in theory), but after nine samplers and nine strike outs we're pretty much ready to give up. Especially when our last choice, 'Key Lime', ended up being essentially Benjamin Moore's version of 'Wind Surfer'.

So, do we abandon colour and embrace white? Is there a colour out there that can transform a cement cube into a lively living space without inspiring the comment 'Whoa, this is really bright' from every first time visitor? Most importantly, how is it that with all of my supposed creative tendencies I can't pick out on single shade of acceptable interior paint!