Hat Lamps

Most people won’t admit it, but one of the fun parts about searching for a home is making assumptions about the current owners just by looking at the decorating inside. And let’s be honest, we secretly enjoy stumbling upon something so dreadful, we can’t help but point and laugh.

When I was in sixth grade, my parents gave Brooke and I the option to paint our rooms AND pick out a wallpaper border (whoa). My sister has always been the more practical, sensible twin; she picked an off white paint with a blue floral border.

(Side Note: my parents are notorious for painting every room in the house a different shade of off white. When they finally busted out a light tan for their bedroom a few years ago, I almost had a heart attack).

I am not so tame when it comes to experimenting with colors, so I chose mauve paint. When telling this story to my husband, he narrowed his eyebrows and asked, “what the hell is mauve?” At the time, I told him it’s a combination of pink and purple. In reality, it’s that dirty dark pink color every makeup company discontinued in the late 1980’s because it was so ugly.

To top if off, I picked a hunter green wallpaper border with, what else, ridiculously huge mauve peonies. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I was going through a phase where I LOVED alto saxophones. I had just started playing in the middle school band and was dedicating hours of my time memorizing Kenny G standards to play for my mom (ask my sister, I am not making any of this up).

And what do 12 year olds do when they love something? That’s right, they slap posters of every shape and size on the walls. Yes. I had saxophone posters placed in all corners of the room, with the 2’ x 3’ one affixed to my door. Who needs photos of Jonathan Taylor Thomas or Andrew Keegan when you have a gold saxophone lying across some draped black velvet (again, ask my sister, I am not making this up).

Looking back, I can only imagine what prospective buyers would have assumed about me. Most likely, they would have conjectured I was a retired color-blind music teacher whose wardrobe consisted of “dressy” pastel sweatshirts and bedazzled Keds.

So imagine Josh and I walking into the second bedroom on the main floor and seeing these. Brows were furrowed. Lips were pursed. Heads cocked slightly to the left in confusion.

At first, we assumed that these decorative accents were installed in place of a little girl’s headboard. Flanking the bed, perhaps this child, at one time, had a garden themed bedroom and these vintage straw hats were supposed to be charming. But then we got closer and realized it was so much worse than what we imagined. These were not just ugly hats affixed to the wall. These were hat LAMPS affixed to the wall.

I wish someone could have captured our faces as we pulled down on the small silver chain and the god-awful thing lit up. It was a cross between complete horror and childlike wonderment. Even our realtor was at a loss for words.

Maybe some mauve paint will help.