a peek inside the fishbowl

The other day I was at the mall when I suddenly heard someone yell: “YOUR RENO IS LOOKING REALLY GOOD.” It was someone I know very peripherally from my neighbourhood, practically a stranger. I’m not sure if he even knows my name. The girls and I walked over and chatted with him about it a little bit.

I find this hilarious, talking about the details of our closet space and bathrooms with random people like this. But it seems that folks are universally interested in renovations.

It’s almost always the first thing people ask us. How is the reno going? To summarize: it’s going great. There have been many times where something could have gone terribly wrong and cost us a lot of extra money (during the digging of the basement, for example) but so far so good.

However the story I want to share with you is a real doozy about the one lousy thing that’s happened to us so far. And the star of this story is Very Bad Graphic Design. Seriously.

This happened before just before we were leaving on a weeklong camping holiday.

Mark biked by the house on his way home from work and he noticed that the roof on the new addition (it’s on the back of our house) was an odd colour. He snapped a quick photo with his iPhone and texted it to me along with four or five exclamation marks. It looked like the wrong colour but it was hard to tell because (a) that part of the roof is pretty high up (b) there are a few trees in the way and (c) the light was hitting it at an odd angle at that moment.

It couldn’t POSSIBLY be the wrong colour of roof shingle, could it?

I jumped in the car and drove over. Sadly, shockingly, it was indeed the wrong colour. We had chosen a medium-dark-grey colour, closer to black. This was closer to white, a milky grey that was the colour of dirty water. What the hell?

We had had a meeting with our builder awhile back, at which point he showed us a card of shingle colours with samples attached to it. We pointed to colour we wanted, telling him that we wanted as close a match to our existing roof colour as possible. Here is a photo of the IKO roof tile colour chart we used to make our selection. The colour we wanted is circled in black.

My mind was reeling. How on earth could this happen? How much was this mistake going to cost us? Could we get away with having a two-tone roof, especially since the new part was hard to see?

Mark and I were stunned. We went home and searched our email, and there it was. A couple weeks before we had been asked to confirm, in writing, the name of the colour of roof tile we wanted. So, looking at the sample sheet (as per above) we had told him we wanted Dual Grey.

We took another look at all of the documents in play and realized that the name of the colour (marked with the letter A below) doesn’t belong to the tile directly above it (marked with a B), but the tile BELOW IT, marked with a C. Holy crap, right?

The colour name is bumped too close to the tile and there’s a drop shadow behind it all, visually differentiating it from the other tiles. Gah! The actual name of the actual tile we actually wanted was HARVARD SLATE. Frig.

I AM blaming IKOs terrible graphic design but also my own idiocy for not studying the sample board hard enough. So, during one of the worst heat waves of the summer, the roofers had to lay the new colour over the old colour. I’m sure they were cursing our names.

Lesson learned. STUDY THE SHEETS and TRIPLE CHECK THE COLOURS.

I can’t believe it either.