We never thought painting the walls would be so difficult - and risky - until we stood in our newly painted corridor, awe-struck.

With the light on, the corridor shone brilliantly. I felt as if I was on a journey in a golden desert, panting for a drop of water nowhere to be found. My sympathetic friend, upon entering the door, uttered: "Your Majesty!" and pretended to kneel down - in feudal China, bright yellow was reserved for the Emperor.

This was far from what we had expected. We had chosen a light hue named "glory yellow" on the narrow strip of paper marked with shades of various colors. Both my husband and I grew up in homes with white walls, and we thought a bit of color would brighten our lives. But it seems our eyes have played a bad joke.

Even though our decorators had warned that when applied on a real wall, this "glory yellow" would be "scorching", we paid no heed.

There was no way back. We planned to paint the dining room walls, ceilings and all the corridors yellow. Our diligent decorators had mixed all five jars of paint into the horrible hue and to replace them would cost us nearly 4,000 yuan ($520).

Seeing our exasperation, the decorators offered remedies. One, a young man who had been in the trade for seven years, quickly added black pigment, brushed it on a piece of paper and dried it on the electric heater.

"This is pretty close to the classic green-yellow that we often mix for customers with Western-style decor," he explained.

Before making the final decision, we went to our friend's home for reference. When bathed in morning sunlight, their bedroom walls glimmered in a color darker than orange. I fancied hearing O Sole Mio by Lucciano Pavarotti and smelling fragrant wine in Tuscany.

According to our expert, this color was something called "honey roasted". This was the one, we thought.

The problem was, it was virtually impossible to roast our glory yellow into "honey", because we had bought different brands of paint, with different chemical compositions. "We had to throw away four small bottles of paint before finding this 'honey'," our friend said.

Years ago, we had jokingly made up a saying: "If there is a problem, you must overcome it by all means. If there isn't a problem, you must create one and overcome it by all means."

Now we must overcome this problem we created. So we accompanied our color expert to the paint center in a nearby department store.

We got some crimson pigment and mixed it into our yellow. It seemed to work. But the paint staff warned: "If you add too much pigment, it won't mix finely and the wall will look really strange."

OK. So be it. We left the experts to salvage the walls. Hours later, we came back to find our home repainted. Well, it was not exactly the Tuscany scenario. The color looked closer to, uhm, pumpkin.

From "glory yellow" to "honey roasted", we had finally settled on a cozy golden pumpkin. Not so bad, perhaps?

(China Daily 01/10/2008 page20)