Tag Archives: Paint

A Carpet Dream Come True … Right?

Image by José Augusto Camargo from Pixabay.

Have you ever lain awake at night for two solid weeks before the scary moment of truth arrives?

The moment when installers are hauling in new carpet for which you paid thousands of dollars?

I feel your pain.

After agonizing debate, I had selected “Dirt Zenith” over “Flaky Rust.” Would the little square’s color, multiplied by dozens of square feet, make my carpet fantasies the past 12 years come true?

Image by Joseph Shohmelian from Pixabay.

Before they laid an inch, I had to leave for a dental appointment. Perhaps you don’t ponder optimistic thoughts while someone digs and drills in your mouth, either. I sank lower and lower in the dental chair.

Returning, I wanted to stay in the garage forever. Would Dirt Zenith clash with the costly Exalted Smudge paint applied earlier to the walls?

Would Flaky Rust have suited it better?

Or should I have chosen Swamp Slime instead?

I crept through the back door. Toward the family room.

Would the stain-hiding texture espoused by the enthusiastic salesman stand out as if in neon? Had I spent a fortune to carpet our house to resemble a 1980s Marriott breakfast room?

Finally, I looked.

Wow.

Dirt Zenith looked darker than expected. Not enough brown? I opened blinds. Sunbeams gleefully pounced on my choice. Ack! Too much gray!

Hubby looked at me. “Don’t. Even. Go. There.”

We moved the furniture back. Brown returned to the carpet, even when pesky sunbeams tried to scare it off. I breathed again.

However, something didn’t fit my fantasy.

The furniture.

How could these tired, outdated sofas and chairs fit anyone’s dream come true?

But will little cloth swatches prove sufficient to fulfill my furniture fantasy?

Hubby doesn’t want to find out.

Your Extraordinary Ordinary: What home ownership venture cost you major cash — and sleep?

At Home with the Temporary

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Hubby and I labeled our new home’s difficulties as “temporary.”

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines that word as “lasting for a limited time.” As in, “This sparkly 1970s wallpaper is temporary.” Or, “This white carpet where kids held pop-spitting parties is temporary.”

In remodeling timelines, “temporary” resembles a blank, signed check.

We should have known better, having delayed remodeling our former house until we’d lived there 23 years. Then spent big bucks making it irresistible … so we could sell it.

Now, 11 years later, “temporary” has caught up with us again.

We’ve made some improvements: new siding, roof, and landscaping. Hubby painted the ugly, “temporary” black front door.

He says it’s orange.

I say it’s terra cotta.

Which illustrates two reasons we procrastinate in updating our home:

Hubby is male.
I am female.

This complicates the simplest project, yet we’ve made progress. After only 45 years of marriage, we not only like our terra cotta/orange door, we arrange decorative pillows on our bed without debate. Hubby keeps the plain one on his side. The fancy one goes on mine.

Surely, we can now agree whether to paint kitchen cabinets Blue Sand or Eggshell Ecstasy.

Hubby’s eyes narrow. “Have you ever seen blue sand? Anywhere?”

I haven’t experienced ecstasy boiling eggs, either. However, I don’t want to extend a discussion about color misrepresentation to blank-check proportions. Then the cabinets will go unpainted another decade.

But a decade is temporary. Not forever.

It just seems like it.

Hubby, a reasonably skilled handyman, could shorten makeover timespans if he were married to a better assistant.

We attempted wallpapering together. Once.

Everything I touched turned to trapezoids.

No matter how carefully I measured. No matter how many tutorial videos I watched.

I should create one for homeowners like myself. I would condense “Seven Simple Steps to Your House’s Total Makeover” to “Two Simple Steps”:

Light a match.
Burn the place down.

But then, I’d have to move again, probably to jail. Even wallpapering with Hubby seems preferable. Though he might feel differently …

I suggest another option, in which we could forego painting the kitchen and cabinets and installing new counters and —

“New counters?” Hubby’s eyes narrow again. “Since when?”

Surely, I say, if we paint the kitchen, we should replace ancient, discolored counters. The flooring’s nicked, too.

“If remodeling seems overwhelming,” I say brightly, “we can move to a different house.”

After we sink a ton of money and work into our present home to sell it.

Before moving to another house with temporary sparkly wallpaper. Temporary stained kitchen counters. And temporary carpet somebody showered with Blue Sand …

Your Extraordinary Ordinary: Are you at home with the temporary?

OMG, It’s Monday! Prayer: Yep, You’re Still Here!

The Blue Dresser

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How did the dresser start out in life? I don’t know, but its size and plain, sturdy lines said, “I belong to a kid.”

The dresser’s original kid probably wadded clothes Mom had folded and stuffed them into its drawers. Perhaps he yanked out drawers, climbed the “stairs” and jumped off the top with an umbrella parachute.

Years later, I discovered that dresser in a secondhand store, marked half-price. It would do until my three-year-old son started school. However, it wore a woebegone, cast-off aura.

My mother, two thousand miles away, whispered in my mind, “Nice find. Great price. But this little dresser needs happy paint.”

As a teen, I’d rolled my eyes when Mom painted end tables orange and a bedroom suite blue. Who did that?

Well … I did. After a critical paint chip comparison, I began painting the chest eye-popping blue. I planned to paint its handles equally vivid red.

Then my young husband needed an emergency appendectomy. While Hubby slowly recovered from complications, I slowly finished the dresser. Late at night, I added a second coat, a third, maybe more — I don’t remember. I experienced a glad moment when I hauled the completed dresser upstairs to my son’s bedroom. An even happier one when I brought his daddy home.

David, flanked by his older sisters, was a toddler when I painted the dresser a vivid blue.

Both had jobs to do. Daddy returned to work. The dresser once more endured yanks, shoves and a “helpful” kid who stuffed clothes Mom had folded into its drawers. (He also attempted to climb to the dresser top, but I stopped him on the second step.)

A doggie bank constructed from a Pringles can resided on it, along with half-consumed PB&J sandwiches and piles of baseball cards. With ABC curtains, Mickey Mouse sheets, and a carpet perpetually layered with toys, the dresser helped make the room my kid’s haven.

But adolescence sneaked in. The first clouds of Eau de Gym Shoe settled over his room and, with them, a dark cloud of protest: Mickey Mouse sheets? Seriously? Did he really need ABCs displayed on his curtains?

David with his wife and their first baby.

I changed his décor to manly navy blue. Strangely, he didn’t ask me to lose the dresser.

Perhaps, even he realized he didn’t need a bigger one. Why, when his wardrobe resided in heaps on the floor?

Plus, the doggie bank’s big smile still matched the dresser perfectly.

One day, he departed for college, then marriage. The cheerful blue dresser, deprived of its kid, looked a little sad.

Now, though, it proudly houses coloring books, finger paints, and Play-Doh for grandchildren.

That dresser was made for kids.

And this old kid still loves it.

Your Extraordinary Ordinary: What furniture in your home tells your family’s story?