April 5, 2005
this old house
My family have all decided to come visit us the last weekend in April. We are delighted about this, as we have not seen my brother and sister-in-law (and, more importantly, the lovely Tess, favorite cousin of Henry and Charlie, in over a year)–so delighted, in fact, that we are REDECORATING OUR ENTIRE HOUSE.
Ahem.
Okay, not exactly the entire house, but two of our four bedrooms–to be specific, the guest room and Charlie’s room. To be more specific, we will be doing the following: repainting our guest room a lovely blue-tinted white (it is now a dark terra cotta color, so this ‘repainting’ will require at LEAST two coats of primer, plus two coats of actual paint), moving all of Charlie’s furniture (including a big plastic desk, a tool bench, and a play kitchen, all of which are currently living in our family room) into the newly painted room, repainting Charlie’s room (which is yellow now but will be a nice beige-y color called ‘tortilla’–and will also require priming) and moving a bed in to make a new guest room.
But it gets better! The bed we will be putting in the newly tortilla-colored guest room is our BRAND NEW CALIFORNIA KING bed, the one currrenly living in the master bedroom. That space will be filled with the twelve-year-old queen bed we were replacing when we bought the king.
Why, you ask, are we putting the fab new bed in the teeny tiny guest room, to be slept in solely by visiting members of my family? Because Wade doesn’t like it. I’ve been sleeping all by myself in said fab king bed since January; Wade says the bed is too hard and he doesn’t sleep well in it. And then, in the next breath, he says, ‘Maybe I could try sleeping in it again and just see.’ And then he thinks about it some more. ‘Do you think it’s comfortable?’ he asks me. Yes, I say. ‘Are you sleeping all right?’ he asks. Besides laying awake at night fretting about how on earth I’m going to get all the toys out of the living room if Charlie doesn’t move into the bigger bedroom, which he can’t because the stupid king-sized bed won’t fit in the smaller room, which means that we will be living with plastic kid furniture and toys all over the house FOREVER, and how in the hell I got talked into this when all I wanted was a new MATTRESS—-other than that, I’m sleeping just fine, thanks.
After literally months of seething about this, I met Wade at the door the other night and announced: ‘Here is the deal: we are going to move Charlie into the big room and get the toys out of the family room. The big bed is going in the little room. There will be no more talking about how you might give the big bed one more try. I’m done. We are going to start painting, and we will have this all finished when my family get here.’
‘Okay,’ he said. And that was that.
So this is a little bit of a nightmare. We have a LOT of painting to do (did I mention that we also need to finish the trim paint in the hallway, a project we started nearly TWO YEARS AGO?), all of which will need to be done on the weekends or at night, and we have a lot of furniture to move around. The king bed will fit (barely) in the soon-to-be guest room, so long as it is the ONLY piece of furniture in that room, which means we need to find a new home for the dresser and vanity that are currently in the guest room. By ‘find a new home’ I mean ‘relocate in this house’–our guest room furniture all belonged to my grandmother, and is not anything we want to part with. The logistics are, as I said, a nightmare.
So, to get the ball rolling, I bought primer and paint yesterday; tonight I think I’ll start taping the (current) guest room and the hallway, and tomorrow I’ll start painting the hall. Wade will have to sleep in the ‘big’ bed while we paint (unless he wants to take a chance of being overcome by paint fumes) so there is still the possiblility he will decide he likes the new bed after all (ha ha ha ha I am so funny). And today, in an effort to get closure on the whole bed thing, I’m going to order a new bedskirt and new shams for the OLD bed–it may be squashy, but it might as well look nice.
Finally, I have grand plans of sanding and repainting the doors of the armoire in Charlie’s room. Currently, they have teddy bears painted on them, but the bears have thse bright blue eyes that give me the heebies, so the doors are in the back of Wade’s closet. But we’re going to put an old TV in there, as Charlie’s room is going to double as a playroom, and I want to be able to close the armoire up and not have the TV there all the time (the boys won’t have cable, just a circa-1992 TV and VCR, so they can watch CinderElmo and The Wiggles without driving me berserk). I’m hoping to do that after all the other painting is done. And all before April 27th. Whew.
Internet, I hope I survive.
Posted by Susan @ 1:22 pm • Uncategorized
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