Next Tuesday I have a baby. Do I have a car seat yet? Nope. I figure Mike'll pick one up when I'm in the hospital.
And, once again, next Tuesday I have a baby. So now would be a great time to paint the attic staircase and my room.
But see, the attic stairwell was just so gross. A single coat of whitewash over 104 year old plaster. The steps in a worn out brown paint over worn out brown wood. It needed something. And I gave it something--a butter yellow on the walls and a brick red oil shine on the steps. It looks like a new place.
My room? Ahem. Here's a snippet of the wallpaper we've been living with for 10 years:
Now, some optimistic folks might think, hey, floral, that isn't so bad. But it is pervasive in the environment, like the common cold virus, all over every vertical or semi-vertical surface in the room. And I'm a stickler about florals. I think that flowers that grow together on a stem should have:
a) the same color, or at least range of color. Navy, brown, and yellow do not grow on the same plant.
b) the same number of petals. This one really bugs me. Six-petaled and five-petaled flowers do not grow on the same plant. Not without some sort of radiation accident.
c) the same general size. There should not be large-as-my-fist 5 color monsters growing next, and connected to, tiny 4-petaled powder blue buttons. It's just wrong.
I realized that with baby coming, and baby sleeping in a crib next to my bed, if I didn't paint RIGHT NOW I'd be living with this wallpaper in another 3 years. All the rest of the house has been saved from old lady wallpaper syndrome. Why I chose to leave my room for last, I just can't tell you. But Mike smoothed out the seams and cracks this evening while I was at book club, and tomorrow I will prime over this wallpaper (I know, if we were true purists, we would scrape and mud and sand and get rid of the wallpaper first, but, really, I'm tired. Not only am I tired, but this wallpaper was put up with portland cement or something insane like that. It does not peel. Even when I soak parts of it and come back later. It is stuck fast and I don't care anymore).
Wednesday, my sister Bevin is coming over and the two of us will paint this room. We're going with a warm beige--really kind of a camel color--with one wall in a slightly darker camel color. I was hoping for something more daring, but the woodwork is all dark cherry. The mantel is dark cherry. My dresser is (coincidentally). The baby bed is. And our new bed is. Every other room in the house is a hodgepodge of wood colors, floor colors, furniture, and we can get away with bolder ideas if we care to. But this room looks like we did it on purpose, so I agreed with my much more savvy sister that we should go with a nice warm neutral and I think it will be lovely.
But, yeah, total denial. It'll be done in barely enough time to move the furniture back into place and get the rest of everything put away.
I've never been one to pace myself.
7 comments:
That wallpaper? Can I say, BLECH? How did you live with that for 10 years and not go blind?
Yeah! I know!
We just had so much to do in this house, that we were just tired by the time we got to that room. And then you get tired of doing any kind of home improvement....and stop seeing it...sort of.
You can do it Bridgett! (And Bevin.) Any colour would be an improvement over the wallpaper... but I know what you mean about no longer seeing something after you've been around it for a while.
That wallpaper looks like a bedspread I used to have.
Good luck getting this done. Are you painting over the wallpaper or taking it down first?
Good idea about getting rid of it before the baby arrives -- he may grow up to be a bad artist or misinformed botanist if you don't. (Apparently Frank Lloyd Wright's mom put up drawings of buildings when he was in a crib to encourage him to become an architect.)
You're not in charge of cookies are you? That would really be in denial.
Oh, no, thank goodness no. I'm the leader but I have a cookie manager. Still have to sell some, but no cases of cookies will be dropped at my house, no booth sales to coordinate, etc.
I like the nuclear accident reference. I imagine the paper went up in the early 70s, a decade not known for either taste or reality. Maybe they found plasterboard with that finish, and thus the impossibility of removal, sort of like the 4X8 sheets of some melamine concoction meant for basement bathroom walls. They had it in the toilet stall in Penny's old basement--but in some subdued yet shiny beige finish. I think it had stripes. Now, that basement was an interesting place, a cross between a rabbit warren(sp?) and a bomb shelter.
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