Messy business

Have you ever remodeled? You know, decided to paint a room, or wallpaper the bath? Maybe you even did something more serious, such as have the kitchen re-done. Our online Hitty friend Esther just remodeled her Hitty’s kitchen. That was a huge undertaking. We are not that brave.

The other Hitty cousins and I have been working with Happy to simply decorate our new house. As previously mentioned, we foolishly moved right in without doing anything to the place first, so what we want to do now can’t even be considered a remodel – it’s just plain old decorating. And I have to tell you, the house has been in an uproar. I can’t even post a picture of how badly things went for us in the first room, and I’m rather grateful that we didn’t record the bad parts, only the results.

First, we had to clear out the furniture and the still unpacked boxes. Of course what with pushing and pulling, we managed to knock over a pitcher with a dried flower arrangement. That went everywhere and had to be cleaned up and re-arranged. Worse, we completely forgot that the secretary desk, one of our largest pieces of furniture, is actually two parts. We have moved it before, and we have done before exactly what we did this time, which only makes what we did this time seem worse.

The entire top half of the piece with the mirrored doors is completely separate from the desk at the base. Naturally, it’s not stable. Naturally, it fell. Now the first thing we worry about when a piece of furniture falls is whether there is anyone under it. Fortunately, nobody was. But the mirrored top did hit the edge of an open door below it on the way down from the living room to the floor – about two feet down, then that edge of a door, and then the final two feet or more down to the hardwood floor. Let me just say that before this happened, I had no idea how many pieces that half a piece of furniture could suddenly become. It was a magic trick – 1/2 equals 9? Strange math. Anyway, we all took a deep breath and held it while Happy ran for the glue and made it all right again. As she pointed out, it broke apart rather than splintered. Sometimes, weak glue jobs can be good.

I never realized how much work it would be to paper just one room, even when its empty, to cut trim pieces, then paint them, and finally to get everything installed. But after a few hours of work, we were ready to set all the furniture back in place.

Our beautiful new living room

Of course once you have done something like this, you are inspired to do more. But first, you are inspired to rest up. This was a lot more work than we anticipated. However, to celebrate, I decided to give a small piano concert for my helpers.

Eva put her book down just to listen to me play

The concert was a great success. It was wonderful to finally have a mostly decorated room that we could all enjoy and finally free of all those ugly packed boxes.

That's Happy Hitty (named after our benefactor) on the left in the red, Hitty Rae next to her, and Maggie in the blue. That's me, HittyG, standing beside my piano.

Now, it’s been nearly a week since that craziness, and we are all beginning to think that maybe – just maybe – we could tackle another room. Unfortunately, when the paper for the bedroom, our next project, was purchased, the buyer must not have been thinking very hard about the whole thing. We soon discovered that the beautiful pink and white striped floral paper for that room was significantly shorter than the other paper purchased for the house. Like inches shorter. Worse, the bedroom has the tallest ceiling of any room in the house. So combine a tall ceiling with short paper and we were in trouble.

You can see the paper propped behind the bed. And you can see that there are miles to go before we reach the ceiling. 😦

We went back to discuss this with Happy who says she can’t recall what she was thinking when she ordered the paper for this room. However, after some thought, she disappeared for a while and returned from a place named after a famous man, Benjamin Franklin, with all of the things we thought we might need, including a big sheet of pink (can you believe it comes in pink?) posterboard. This, she said, could become the painted lower wall, and the wallpaper would go above. Then there would be enough wallpaper to reach the ceiling, and we would simply have to install another chair rail. Ah, more cutting and painting. *sigh*

My, this ruler is heavy - a little help here, please!

Someone else has came up with the idea that perhaps we should do a picture rail closer to the top of the wall instead of another chair rail, which does seem oddly out of place in a bedroom. I rather like the idea – it’s different and even interesting. Happy says fine, whatever. I think she doesn’t much care what we do as long as we get on with it and have enough of whatever we need to get the job done. She’s leaving it to us. Hopefully, though, she’s standing by with the glue bottle … just in case.

So for now, we are contemplating the options, but we will eventually make up our collective little minds and take action. Stay tuned.