My husband Dan has obsessed for months that the unfinished rooms on the second floor of our home were “messing with his Karma.”
There are more pressing home-improvements that he could take on, like replacing the corroded fixtures in the master bathroom, and hiring someone to re-shingle the roof.
There are projects forever pending, like putting up the last piece of cedar to frame the bathtub, and trimming the door to the cheeseplant. Those loose ends don’t faze him at all.
And, I don’t complain about them much, because the plant door opens and closes fine since being changed last summer, and the tub has never fallen through the floor while in use (by me).
I can accept functionality vs. cosmetic faults that force my left eye to twitch uncontrollably only once or twice a year.
The two “spare rooms” have been a personal gym, place to hang Lady Gaga posters, a sewing room, the temporary resting place of boxes marked “lawn sale”, and home for a nearly sentient pile of shame/hoard of old holiday decorations and tatty wool socks in need of a mend.
Fine.
I cleaned out those rooms over the summer - which makes now as good a time as any for change, because I’ll probably start junking them up again soon, if the past is any indicator.
With a firm resolve to complete the task before February (2012), Dan went to Swanton Lumber and bought pre-finished flooring – the kind that snaps together. To his credit, he installed it that same week.
The spanking new floor immediately highlighted that the walls needed painting - which in a perfect world, would have been done before there was something expensive to drip on.
(This snowball effect of additional work is typical of our DIY projects.)
My husband doesn’t choose paint colors, not since the Hello Kitty Pink incident. The foyer looked like a baby’s bedroom for 24 hours before it was re-painted.
I accompanied him to O. C. McCuin’s store, envisioning “yellow or blue”.
Both were rejected straight away.
He gave his parameters: brown, latte (another “brown”), coffee (brown, again) or green.
I can work with green (after all, it’s what you get when you mix yellow and blue).
We agreed on “Farm Fresh Alfalfa”, then, I found the perfect color: “Slightly Camouflage Khaki”! It fit his “man cave” theme without reminding me of old pantyhose, or the color of the vinyl siding on his parent’s house.
Dan said, “We need to choose a new overhead fixture, too, because this one doesn’t give off much light.”
I said, “Wipe the dust off – we’re not buying something new just so you don’t have to clean.”
Later that day, I realized that we had purchased a can of the same shade green as the eggs that our Aruacana chickens produce.
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Araucana Eggs
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I suppose we simply recognized the familiar, but if it turns out that I don’t like it on the wall - it’s in Dan’s weight room – I won’t see it often.
