Sixty coats of paint

When we bought Sundaymo it was beige. Every wall, every door, every one of the sixteen ceilings. Somebody in the eighties had a lot of beige and a lot of time.

One slow afternoon we counted the layers on the office door frame with a pocket knife and got to fourteen before the knife gave up. Across the whole property, the paint store reckoned we were looking at something close to sixty coats, give or take a decade of touch-ups. Most of it was the same tired shade, rolled on over itself every few summers because nobody wanted to be the one to pick something new.

Finding the coral

Under four layers in the office, a paint scraper turned up a sliver of warm coral. We matched it at a hardware store in Indio and it became the colour of the whole place.

It wasn’t quite that simple. The first sample came back too pink, the second too orange, and the third looked perfect indoors and like a traffic cone at noon. In the end we took the original chip, no bigger than a thumbnail, and held it up against swatches in the parking lot at four o’clock, when the light goes gold and everything in the desert looks its best. Swatch number nine won. We’ve never told anyone its real name, partly because it’s called something embarrassing, and partly because “Sundaymo coral” sounds better.

Once we had the coral, the rest of the palette fell into place. Turquoise came from a tile we found behind the ice machine. Mustard came from an old matchbook in a drawer at the front desk, printed with the motel’s first logo. The cream is just the colour of the walls after a long afternoon of sun, which seemed fair.

Stripping it back

We did most of the work ourselves, a room at a time, with help from friends who were promised tacos and, in a few cases, are still owed them. Here is roughly how a room went:

• Strip the doors and frames back to bare wood with heat guns and a lot of patience.

• Sand, fill and prime, then sand again when the primer showed every mistake.

• Two coats of coral on the doors, cream on the walls, and mustard on the trim if we were feeling brave.

• Leave the windows open for a day and sleep somewhere else.

Sixteen rooms took us most of a year. The office took a month on its own, because every time we removed a layer we found a phone number or a name written underneath in pencil, and we had to stop and photograph all of them.

What was under the carpet

Terrazzo. Original, unbroken, poured in 1962. It took three weekends and a rented grinder to bring it back, and it is still the best thing in Room 12.

Nobody knows why it was carpeted over. The best theory comes from a guest who stayed here as a child in the seventies and remembers the floor being “freezing in the morning and slippery when wet”, which is fair, and also exactly why we put down a rug and kept everything else. The terrazzo is flecked with green glass and mother-of-pearl, and when the morning sun comes through the window it throws little lights across the ceiling.

The things we kept

Not everything got a fresh coat. The room numbers on the doors are the original brass, polished but never replaced. The pool fence still has a dent from what we’re told was a 1971 Buick. And one wall in the office still shows a strip of every colour we found, layer by layer, under a sheet of glass. Guests stop and look at it more than at anything else in the room.

If you stay in Room 12, take your shoes off. The floor has been waiting sixty years for someone to notice it.