mix.up.

Since I built my own dining room table, that meant I had no chairs. In keeping with the "build stuff out of trash to save money" theme, I started picking wooden chairs up at thrift stores for $3.99. I had two, bought three, and still needed three more to make eight.
Today was trash day. Since I'm traveling to the b's house instead of just rolling out of bed at eight, I was outside before the trash men came. As luck would have it, our neighbors were getting rid of three perfectly good chairs. They were exactly what I was looking for- wooden, all different, and funky cool. I snatched them before someone else did, and then zipped to home depot for the color. My theory was that if I got eight completely different chairs, and then painted them all the same color (something daring enough to make them cool instead of blah), they'd all sort of "go."
We got to home depot, and after some hemming and hawing, I picked out a deep eggplant color (the color I'd been drawn to from the start). It'll go well with the paper bag brown in the dining room, but still pop enough to contrast with the blues of the kitchen and living room. I wanted high gloss (to further proclaim "I'm cool!" to anyone who sits on it) and the nice paint guy entered in the info and went off to retrieve a gallon. He slapped the label on it, opened it up to add the color, and found not white, but bright blue paint inside. He guessed that someone had put it in the wrong place, and went back to get another gallon. This time it was bright pink. The third time he tried it was bright blue again. I was tempted to guess that he was the one confused, and was picking them up from the wrong spot. The fourth gallon he brought back was from a different box in the back of the shelf- not somewhere a mixed up gallon would have landed. He asked the girls what color they thought it would be, and L said orange. She was correct. It was so unimaginable that we couldn't do anything but laugh. The paint guy thinks the company made the mistake since the fourth gallon was from somewhere no one else could really mix up. We were running tight on time, so I had him color match the paint swatch and make it in a different brand. How often does this happen??