If you give your wife a paintbrush she’s going to want some paint to go with it. At the paint store she will grab paint, tape, and spackling to get the wall ready for some new color.
When she gets home she will look around the living room and think about how to rearrange it. She will spot the old piano that is missing a wheel and won’t hold a tune and she will convince you that it should be turned into a desk. The new desk should go into your bedroom and the old desk that was in your bedroom can be put in the son’s bedroom. So you begin taking apart the piano. The strings will go to your daughter to try and make jewelry with. The front you will save and make a corkboard or whiteboard with. Not sure yet on that one.
After your wife moves all the furniture off of two of the walls and starts washing the walls to prepare to paint she is going to want baseboards for the room.
She will also bring up either painting or getting new door moulding. You decide on new moulding, so after work you head to the home improvement store again to get baseboards and door moulding. When you get home and take the old moulding off you realize that the drywall is not level with the door frame and you need to smooth out the gap.
That adds an extra day to your project and another trip to the hardware store. This time includes something fun for you. You get a new saw so that you can do all the angle cuts on that baseboard.
While you are at work your wife continues painting. She is not tall enough to reach the top of the wall, and you don’t own a tall ladder, so she borrows one from your father. As she is finishing up the painting in the living room she realizes that there is one whole can of paint that will be left over. She begins dreaming of painting the kitchen as well. She convinces herself to finishing one project at a time.
Pretty soon all the painting is done, your wife begins moving furniture around and put the covers back on the light switches and plugs, that means it’s time for you to put the wheels on the piano/desk. An hour and one bent screw later all 4 wheels are on and your wife can now move the soon to be desk around on her own. As you measure the doorway, you realize that by tilting and shuffling you can get the old desk out of your room, but in order to put in the new one you will need to take the door off and remove part of the frame. So you do that, and the two of you push and pull to get that new desk into your room.
After all the baseboards are installed, the new door moulding is up, and the furniture is in place you can begin putting pictures back on the walls. Up they go. Next is the coat racks. A tall one for the older children and adults and a lower one for the younger kids. Lastly up go the decorative mirrors. The living room is finally put back together, and doesn’t it look good? But don’t forget, your wife still has her paintbrush and that extra can of paint.
I think one of the hardest parts of this was the fact that we still had to live in the house while we were painting it. I didn’t have anywhere to move the furniture to, so it just got shoved from one side of the room to the other. The kids also loved climbing all over the furniture. I worried about if I had put the pictures in a safe enough spot so that they wouldn’t get broken before I could get them back up onto the walls. All in all, it was worth it, but be prepared, next time you go to do a project, it just may turn into an adventure reminiscent of a children’s story.
A Cup of Crazy and a Dash of Love 