Painting An Old Console To Fit New Standards

Growing up, the TV was our center, our friend, entertainment, and at times, our babysitter. I devoured it and the shows I watched, and learned about politics, friendships, family and even death, from rotating pictures on loop in my room and around our house. To get your own TV wasn’t as much a right of passage, as it was expected. Times any one kid and needs by five, and anything should go. That was the 90s, of course. TV was readily accessible. I didn’t have an iPad, or a phone. I still played with Barbies and stuffed animals, too. 

These days, I hold tongue during conversations of any form on TV time. As if to say “anything goes, as long as it works.” But what has gone, is my ability to sit in the living room and truly entertain myself with it as I once did. My children take their sticky Pirate Booty fingers and tap a revolving password in a tiny flat screen machine. It knows exactly what they watched and when, and engages them. There’s automatic app-timers that rule their use, because I’m too tired to argue over hours and minutes after a certain point. At night, I grab my lemon ginger tea and crawl in bed to watch an unnamed program from the screen that has overtaken my own desk since December. 

Perhaps, it is because of all of these new developments that our television in the living room seemingly fades into the distance. Its lack of use does not mean a lack of desire to keep it. So it sits, ready to be played when the kids get their Saturday cartoons and the smallest devices stay asleep along with hopes to utilize them. 

This says nothing of the irritation I feel when looking at the stand where the TV sits each morning. Tucked in a corner, pre-loved and waiting here for us when we moved in nearly four years ago. It wasn’t broken, it was the perfect height, and it was far too heavy to unload and too silly not to use. As with many things, over time one kid decided to write their name on it; another decided to paint on it. There were many spills and layers of hand prints from God-knows-where. While “anything goes” has become a go-to motto these days, certain things I just can’t kick. Which is to say, I will happily still distract myself fixing or styling something when I am pressed on work time and unfamiliar with “free-time” to just do it.

Here’s the TV console before.

And here are some inspiration images I pulled when deciding to go with the green I had left from this project.

Somehow (read: always), carving energy for an ever-evolving home in fits and bursts opens strange portals to other work that requires more intense application. There’s still handprints on every single wall in the joint, and I wonder how the kids’ room is already bursting with things that we just organized. Despite that, I’m feeling relieved and ridiculously pumped for the new console that cost zero dollars and zero cents, but gives back twice-over. O keeps saying, “It’s SO modern!” While he’s not wrong, I think it’s just so us. 

(Text image on green via We The Urban . Second image of kitchen via The World of Interiors, Roland Beaufre. Vessel: mini Imperfect sale Simone Bodmer-Turner , The Birth Of Cool: Barkley L. Hendricks, similar candle stick, Sonos SL, and vintage candle stick holder. The color of the paint is Yeabridge Green by Farrow & Ball. This post includes affiliate links. If you choose to purchase something, we may earn a small commission.)