Paint

Immediately on arrival in Denmark in 2019, we had to start looking for somewhere to live. We'd rented a summer house on a golf course at the coast but it was small, overpriced and with 3m high glass walls was constantly either slightly too cold or waaay too hot! It consisted of four white bedrooms, two white bathrooms and one white dining-living room.

We quickly drew up a shortlist of maybe a dozen houses within driving distance to Thomas's new job which were big enough not only to house the five of us but also my two older children whenever they visited. With most of the schools in the area being of a similar and reasonable quality, the most important criterion to me was space for them, otherwise it would be hard to feel like as close a family going forward.

After viewing a few, it began to strike me that no matter how different they might look on the outside, the inside was much of a muchness. Every room in every house we visited was white. Eventually we found one, the one we ended up buying as it happens, which had one of the 10+ rooms in a different colour (the TV room was pale green), but other than that it was a sea of white. Everywhere looked very clean and crisp, and quite beautiful but also quite foreign to us. Scottish homes tend to have coloured rooms - be that conventional cream, trendy grey, or feature walls in dark colours or fancy wallpapers. Very few houses in Scotland use white for anything other than maybe the bathroom or at a pinch the kitchen. So, although everywhere looked beautiful, it felt very alien.

Once we'd bought our house, the kids asked if they could have one coloured wall each and I agreed. So off we went to Bauhaus, our equivalent of B&Q. Up to the paint aisle we went looking for little tester pots and all the various shades, only to find every single pot was white! Now that was a surprise. There was literally not a single pot of coloured emulsion in the shop! You could get dark green or brown garden furniture paint but only white for indoors. That explained the houses we'd viewed I guess. I checked smaller DIY stores and they were the same. How odd!

I resolved to look next time I was in Germany while cursing Danes under my breath. It was fully six months later that I realised you can, at no extra cost, have any colour you like, you just have to have it mixed from a catalogue of colours. So, you shouldn't try decorating your Danish house before you can speak Danish as you need to know how to ask them to mix paint, talk through whether it is to be emulsion, wood paint or metal paint and then they throw their weird paint numbering system into the mix. Danish already has the hardest numbers in the world so why they need to number their paint is beyond me! They ask if you'd like your emulsion 5, 10, 15... all the way up to 30 or maybe it is even 50, I can't quite remember. This turns out to be their matt to gloss scale! 5 is matt, 30 is gloss. The higher the number you ask for, the shinier the paint. So, if you're crap at Danish numbers, you can only paint your rooms matt!

Once we'd painted a few rooms in different shades, Danes commented on how unusual and daring we were not to have only white, and when I painted the garden bench outside in dark green, I got funny looks again and several people commented on how odd garden furniture looks when it isn't white!

Collective mentality is an interesting thing!