Weekend Update

Wherein Our Heroine is Sarcastic.

I am happy to report I have my home office back.

I know, you never knew I had lost it. The story is simple: when we moved in to our house, the entire place was painted in a slightly shiny dull yellow: the color of a really old nicotine stain. It was Ug. Lee. Ambitious new homeowners that we were, we painted the master bedroom, master bath, den, living room, and dining room in one fairly rapid swath (it helped that we started the living room and master bedroom two weeks before our furniture arrived from storage). Then, as one does, we rested. Painting our house was complicated by the previous owner's passion for Things With Adhesive Backing. Many things were stuck to the walls - hooks, a light fixture with a paste-on cord keeper, odd lucite shelving in the bathroom. If it had stickum, the previous owner of our house had stuck it somewhere (often in baffling corners - we wondered if she perhaps just had such a love for the sticking of the plastic that she had to get a fix now and again by putting a hook in an odd back corner of a cupboard).

Actually, there were just all sorts of things affixed to the walls in various ways. In addition to the "fashionable beveled mirrors" about which I have previously spoken, there was a small grandfather clock on a stairway landing that had been screwed to the wall to ensure that it did not fall over. There was also one of those wall-mounted brackets with a swing arm for a small television in the room that is now my office (there were televisions in almost every room of the house as well - we have coaxial cable in the oddest places). The bracket that had been used to bolt the clock to the wall was helpfully left behind - just in case we had our own clock to bolt to the wall, I suppose. The fact that it had been painted around instead of removed and replaced when the painters left their two-packs-a-day signature also left a shadowy reminder of the timepiece that had gone on to a new happy haven of stickum and plastic. My suggestion that we paint a trompe l'oeil clock over the shadow was met with stony disapproval from John.

The former clock-home was spackled and painted last year. The television bracket was probably gone in the first week, along with many other things she helpfully left behind ("Oh, no really - thank you! We love to go to the dump!! It's why we bought the truck - it provides us endless entertainment to take someone else's old paint cans and nasty, never-cleaned draperies to their last reward!"). The little room with its spackled bracket holes had remained more or less untouched except for a new pair of patchwork curtains made out of colorful sari fabric, which heightened rather than lessened the depressive qualities of the un-re-painted room. Since I have been getting a fair amount of freelance work lately, I have been spending more and more time in my office and I was finally fed up with its yellow dinginess. After a few weeks, I guess John became fed up with hearing me whine about it, and he proposed an aggressive Easter weekend work plan which was duly executed.

Pictures will follow once I am cleared for re-hanging the artwork on the walls. Let us just say that I am very happy with my newly green, cozy little office.

Posted: Monday - March 28, 2005 at 07:16 AM | |