COMPULSIVE COLORS

WASHINGTON — At 5 a.m. Chris Arrasmith slips quietly out of bed, pads downstairs to the dining room and climbs onto a ladder. Armed with a gallon of Farrow & Ball “Wet Sand” and a one-and-a-half-inch angle brush, she begins painting the molding. She will work for three hours, remove the ladder — she never uses a dropcloth or tape — have breakfast with her husband, Tom, and head off to her job selling commercial computer networks for Sun Microsystems. After a week of this routine, the room’s white trim will be a rich nutmeg.

This is the seventh time in five years Arrasmith has painted their Capitol Hill dining room. She has done the living room eight times (including several colors below the chair rail and, two weeks ago, a dry-brushed glaze above it). The kitchen is on its fourth color combo. The master bath has had two hues plus a mural of peacocks. The bedroom is on its third color and would have had others, but there is too much furniture to move, she says, almost apologetically.

Next month, she plans to tackle another set of walls, a ceiling or cabinetry in this three-story townhouse where, fortunately, the rooms are quite small and the ceilings are not too high.

“There is something really transformational about doing it,” says Arrasmith. “It just makes me feel good.”

Such are the ways of those we can diagnose only as Chronic Serial Painters.

They are generally an industrious lot, toiling before dawn, past midnight, on weekends, when they should be at work, while the kids are asleep or in school. They paint alone, with spouses or friends. Some are willing to pay professionals.

For many CSPs, riding the color wheel is a joyous exercise, and they have no intention of getting off. To them, painting, like life itself, is about the journey, not the destination. It’s about hopeful beginnings that are well worth having furniture piled in the center of a room, rugs rolled up in the hallway, gummy brushes in the sink and the coffee maker buried under a tarp.

For others, it is the result of agonizing choices gone awry: colors that look one way on a paint chip and quite another on the wall, or turn out to be way too dark after dusk, or nowhere near the leafy green in the carpet.

Consider Alexandria, Va., interior designer Nancye Lewis. She has chosen three colors for a basement guest bedroom and four each for the living room, master bedroom and kitchen. This last space, now an alluring red, required seven coats of primer and paint to cover the previous slate blue.

“I think I am a paint freak,” says Lewis. In grade school, she and her friends swapped paint chips “like they were trading cards.” Years later, her mother routinely let her buy gallons of $5 clearance paint for her teen bedroom, with periwinkle and cantaloupe becoming favorites.

These days Lewis is driven by the irresistible designer fabrics she chooses for her clients. Each time she buys more yardage for herself, her walls get redone. In fact, an unused guestroom currently bears 15 to 20 large swaths of test colors. “I have spent thousands of dollars on paint, even with my designer’s discount,” she says.

Donna Ball of Ellicott City, Md., a marketing rep for an architectural firm, painted her way through an open-plan townhouse and is now working on a 1950s ranch. She’s done most of its rooms twice but is holding off on the kitchen and bathrooms pending remodeling. With a baby on the way, she is considering stripes for the nursery, and characterizes her ongoing avocation as “kind of like getting a different haircut for a room.”

According to paint professionals, CSPs tend to be female. “They are often at-home moms whose project is beautifying the house,” says Charlie Boswell, co-owner of the Color Wheel in McLean, Va. “They typically make most of the lifestyle decisions.”

This labor-intensive endeavor yields relatively high-impact cheap thrills. Latex paint sells for as little as $12 to $15 a gallon, rising to $80 or $90 per gallon for the most richly pigmented luxury brands. Buying paint is often is no more costly than picking up a $20 DVD or lipstick every few weeks, or $95 shoes each season.

The frequent change is surely not a matter of need. Paint industry experts estimate that a family with children and pets can go three or four years without needing to repaint. If no destructive forces are in residence (including smokers), a paint job could last six to 10 years.

Jody Kelly of Arlington, Va., says her “obsession” with paint began when daughter Stevie, now 11, started kindergarten and Kelly suddenly had a few hours to spare. Stevie’s room has since been painted three times, most recently lime green and bright blue, with a horse head stenciled on the lavender ceiling. The floor of the front porch sports an elaborate five-color quilt design. The brick fireplace in the family room has gone from white to a Martha Stewart green to a random pattern with each brick individually painted. “It looks,” says Kelly, “like the work of someone with too much time on her hands.”

Bryan Casey is general manager of the Regal Paint Centers in Silver Spring, Md. He’s seen plenty of customers agonize endlessly over color choices. “My job would be a lot easier if there were only four different colors instead of over 5,000,” he says. “The same people who buy 30 quarts or two-ounce samples think it’s the best thing that ever happened to them and that they are saving money because they are getting little bits of color. But what they are really giving themselves is more ideas, so they get more paint and it kind of creates a cycle.”

That doesn’t even count custom-mixed colors. “You can get any color you find copied, to match your makeup, a picture in a magazine,” says interior stylist K.T. Wilder, who works with her brother, Bethesda, Md., builder/designer Anthony Wilder. “And you can add anything to paint — sand, glitter — to get a special finish.”

Wilder is even willing to expend major effort on her rented apartment. She got her landlord’s okay to ebonize the wood floors and paint the walls lavender, taupe, gray and teal. “My environment means everything,” she says.

Cate Watson, a project manager for a video streaming company, and her husband, David, a procurement manager, are tandem painters who have redone all eight rooms of their Kensington, Md., home at least twice in five years.

The hallway was most troublesome. “I first tried pale yellow and it was just awful: too cutesy, too sweet. The following weekend I tried antiquing it with one of the Ralph Lauren kits and I hated that, too,” she says, “so a little while later I did light and dark khaki stripes. They were, and are, a triumph.”

Stripes are one thing, but how about the a couple who repainted their family room just for the holidays?

“Three walls were green and the fourth was red to provide contrast for the Christmas tree,” says Dawn Ford, co-owner of Ford’s Painting and Wallcovering Inc. in Silver Spring, Md. She dispatched a crew to create the clients’ yuletide ambience. “We’re back there now painting it yellow and white for spring. In fact, we’ve been there three weeks trying to get the exact yellow they want. And I’m sure we’ll be back again soon.”

Another Ford client — wealthy enough to afford it — has her decorator change the whole interior of her home, including paint colors, every six to eight months, Ford says.

Chronic serial painter Linda Acosta calls her passion for paint “obsessive-compulsive disorder, or maybe it’s just attention-deficit disorder.” Only one bathroom of her large Spanish colonial home in Phoenix got just a single coat of paint beyond its original white. “It has 14-foot ceilings and the ladder straddled the tub. It was too dangerous to do over.”

Space considerations preclude listing the dozens of colors she has used throughout the house in the past two years, but there was a moment when the first floor’s overall palette of brown, green, yellow and gold “looked like camouflage…. That’s when I went to orange and tan.”

Acosta has found a bonus in perpetual painting. “Every time I start a project I lose 10 pounds. I don’t know if it’s adrenaline or exercise.”

On the downside, she laughs, her electrician husband, who does not like to paint, occasionally walks through the front door “and says he doesn’t know what house he’s in.”