I never understood color blindness until I met my husband. Sometimes it makes me sad that he can’t fully appreciate the nuances of colors and the way they change in a sunrise or sunset.
Hubs is considered red/green color blind but it also affects other colors for him. Adding to that problem is the fact that he gets dressed at O-dark-hundred and the lighting isn’t great in our bedroom. He couldn’t tell black from navy or green from gray.
Last year, before my surgery, I decided to set up a system for him to be able to tell his pants apart since I would be incapacitated for a while. Every pair of pants looked either black or gray to him.
I grabbed some tags from my craft studio and put them over his pants hangers, labeling each color of pants for him with a marker. We had previously tried marking the inside waistband or tag of his pants with the color, but it meant that he had to hang the pants back up if they ended up not being the ones he wanted.
This system has worked well for him. He can match almost any of his shirts to the pants because he knows the colors of his shirts according to their patterns. If he couldn’t, I would have hung his shirts with tags stating which pants they could go with. Time-consuming? Yes, but it would have helped him a lot and made mornings go smoother.
The only other area that caused problems was his sock drawer. Black looked brown. Brown looked green. Green looked. . . , well you get the picture.
I grabbed my labeler and made some quick labels. I added them to the drawer fronts, just inside the top of the drawer. Then I took some old shoe boxes and lined them up. I usually label alphabetically from left to right but this time, because the black and dark blue socks are so close in color, I put brown/green in the middle to separate them in case there was some spillover. This also helps me to put his socks away because, as a short person, I can’t actually see down into his top drawer! I can, however, easily place socks in the proper boxes because I know the order of the colors.
Then, in order to help my husband keep his good clothing separated from his grubby clothing, I labeled his drawers to keep things straight.
What is the grubby clothing system in our home? Well, good jeans, pants, shorts, shirts, sweatshirts, etc. can be worn to church, work, and out with the wife. Grubby clothing can be worn to Home Depot or the Automotive shop if unattended by wife, while working in the yard, working on the car, climbing under the house, etc. There are a few grubby items that cannot be worn even to Home Depot and must be inspected before leaving the premises – you never know when you will run into someone from church or one of my clients.
