Working toward a finish

Back again.

With the help of friends the old couch was taken to the curb and the new rug was rolled and loaded into the van. Phone calls were made.

Mirror over the fireplace. Among the things I had packed up when I closed my mother's apartment was a big plate glass mirror. It has rested in it's packing case against the wall in my bedroom since those movers brought it here. Thursday, I called the local mirror and glass place and not only were they able to send out a man to unpack the mirror and make an estimate but when I accepted their price they immediately sent a man to install it. Lucky us. We had agreed that the mirror could be cut down to fit if necessary and that we planned to leave in in the house when we moved out. The mirror is 60 inches wide. The wall above the fireplace is 62 inches wide. It is a lovely fit. We will add a white enamel 6 inch board below the mirror for a bit of extra support and are still "discussing" using a matching piece above.

Friday I delivered the rug to the cleaners.

We designated Sunday as the day Dear Husband would help me get the stair wall painted. Working together that job took an amazingly short time. His extra 4 inches of height made all the difference and no scaffolding was needed. I spent the rest of the day taking down the screen and front doors and getting them taped and sanded. I was able to prime the front door and with the help of my wonderful work light I was able to get a coat of enamel on the outside. A door with 15 windows must have been designed for skills acquisition. All those small parts. The color turns out to be passable but is not at all what I hoped it would be, much more a deep deep coral or perhaps if being negative brick, instead of a clear jewel toned burgundy. Rats. But FINISHED IS A CATEGORY.

Monday, I put away all of the painting gear, and spent a happy glad hour tearing up the last of the blue tape. IF this good weather holds I may get some paint onto the screen door before the end of the week. Any other painting jobs can wait till after the holidays. Sweeping, vacuuming and furniture arrangement will start any minute now.

Clean up day. Take up the tarps, pull up all of the paper and blue tape. Admire the paint job. The old woodwork was either dark brown or cocoa colored. Now it is all shiny white enamel. The walls are this soft changeable yellow green color. The floor still needs a lot of work. No decision on the wall above the fireplace but it is clean and freshly painted and no one knows we are working out a decision as it just looks like a wall. The accent color on the steps looks very nice.

The next executive decision. We will do a second coat of paint. But not this month. There is just not enough energy or mind left. The stair wall is still left to do, but it is all high edges and odd angles and is going to take some planning to do well and a day when Dear Husband is here to work with me.

Furniture pick up day. Once the van seats are out we are off to the shop to make our pick up. And there it was the rug, the Rose Damask Couch and the little Victorian side chair. We also picked up the rocker for our daughter's impending one.

Now the cleaning phase begins. When we selected the rug there was a dining room set arranged on it. The first time we will see the entire thing is when we unroll it in our living room. Vacuum the room. Unroll the rug, not bad, it will need to be professionally cleaned but doesn't have other than real life experience to it. Vacuum the rug, a lot, turn the rug over and vacuum the back side, a lot. Turn the rug right side up and vacuum again. Yup,this will work but I would like to get it cleaned, a cream colored background does show it's long life. Bring in the little Victorian side chair and the rocker. Nice. Now, here it comes, the Rose Damask Couch. Sitting right there in our living room.

None of us are sure of anything right now. So unexpected, so lovely, so different than things were. All I was planning to do was get a coat of paint on the walls to deal with the spots that grew after the hurricane. Now what I have is an entirely new room. The Rose Damask Couch sits there, covered in dust from it's previous home but basically spotless, hump backed, tufted, so different from our previous style. Tomorrow, I promise, tomorrow I'll clean you up and we'll get to know each other.

And today, I did.

She's a tricky one, my friend. She said, let's go and see if we can find a nicer looking, newer couch for you. What she seems to have been seeing inside her head was an entirely new room. How amazing that all of this came to pass just as we were doing all of this painting. My daughter confirms that they did discuss this months ago. We are just plain flabbergasted.

I met her at the shop and we had a good long look around. She had several couches to point out to me. There were some nice pieces there in a range of styles and types. Dear Husband was able to come down and help make the final decision. And we selected The Rose Damask Couch. He headed back to work and she follows up with, "Now let's look for a rug and some side chairs."

?? ??? ??? Yikes. She said couch, singular, one couch. Nope she was planning on a whole room. Haunting the used furniture shops and designing whole rooms is her new hobby. It seems it is now our turn.

And thus the final collection included the Rose Damask Couch and a thick oriental style rug, a rocker for our mother-to-be and a lovely small Victorian side chair. And the discussion of where I was going to draw the line. I'll use or select my own art and we have definite ideas about what kind of chair to look for for Dear Husband. I will also retain the end tables we purchased with wedding present money and the floor lamps I inherited from my Mom. The whole scheme is going to be much more grown up/formal and lighter in color. But we'll have no real idea until we get the things into the house.

It's still amazing. She said couch. We said we'd go look. It felt a little like facing a juggernaut.

It is very hard to believe that all of that, turns out to be merely prelude.

The color was on the walls and I was looking forward to starting to work with the shiny white enamel. My friend drops in. We have know each other a long time. Our children are a married couple. We are co-in-laws and I regret that our language has no real label for our relationship. On this day she is here to drop off presents for the baby shower for our first grandchild together. She lives very far away and travels a great deal. She will not be able to attend the shower in few weeks. But she says, she has had a desire and wants to talk it over to me. She and her husband have a pied-a-terre in a near by town. They are in our area now, every couple months. She has used her amazing shopping skills to decorate their little place, then went on to help her daughter-in-law decorate her place. Now she would like to use her skills and her amazing find of the mother lode of quality consignment furniture to give me a couch.

She said couch, singular, one couch. She agrees that was what she said. Little did I know.

That day I got out the accent color and painted the decorative panels on the stairs and did the cutting in on the stair wall.

The next day my friend came over and helped me paint the enamels. It was a lovely long busy day. I enjoyed her company very much and we got the enamel work in the entire room finished while chatting merrily about our kids and how much fun it will be to have a grand child and solving all of the other problems of the world.

The following day, we went shopping.

Start the cutting in for the paint color. Repeat the entire climb, paint, climb, move process, again and again until we have an entirely painted room. Except for that mirrored wall over the fire place. The plan was to replace the molding around the wall of mirror tiles. Sunday, Dear Husband is home and he is spotting for me as I climb the scaffold with the pry bar. Glory hallelujah, while easing the old molding away from the ceiling, one of the mirror tiles pops off the wall. Those nasty things were only up there with double sided sticky tape. If I had know that, I'd have had them down years ago. Each one popped right off and got packed into a box to be sent off to the recycle or dump, whatever, as long as it left my house. Under the mirror tiles, - real paper wallpaper. Wait a moment while the memory files cycle. A wet sponge, bring me a wet sponge and the wide scraper. And with careful and frequent applications of both, working as a team, we returned that wall to it's original state. Clean, flat, smooth. Now, there are possibilities, things to check out, there is that big plate glass mirror in storage, or that big print and the question of whether to permanently remove or replace the electric candle sconces. But that can wait for later. Wait a day for all that sponging to dry, cut in, prime, cut in and a final coat of paint. Unity at last. Imagine the room giving a comfortable sigh.


Now starts the saga of the Rose Damask Couch itself.

Prime the walls. Prime the woodwork. Open the paint can, stir the paint. What a lovely contemplative action that is. Arrange the painting tools, hmmmm. .. . love love love my toys.

Up the ladder onto the scaffold. Prime 6 feet of cutting in ceiling edges or window trim or whatever. Down the ladder. Move the scaffold. Prime 6 feet of floor level cutting in and baseboards. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Observe how big a room becomes when all of the furniture has been removed. Finally, get out the paint pan and the roller with the long handle and fill in the primer on the walls. Whoa, it already looks like an entirely different room. Can't resist, must open the colored paint can and fill in that small patch over the door. It has been so much work, I am eager to see what it will look like. Just like a little taste of the pleasure to come. Dear husband has made the mental adjustment and agrees that this change will be all right.

There have been rest days in this process or days allotted to shop for supplies. Thank goodness. Regularly scheduled social activities have continued but I have invoked the one activity per weekend rule. I am so tired.

Another day. Get out the bucket and sponge and wipe the plaster work smooth. Get out the electric mouse sander and the paint scrapers and start prepping all of the woodwork. All of the woodwork. The tall baseboards and the wide window and door trim. Paint chips start accumulating by the cup full. Paint is popping off down to what looks like the original first application. All of the woodwork. Every bit of it. Wonder if that funny buzzing fizzy feeling will ever leave my hand. Lucky, lucky me. Dear husband comes home from work each evening and does the final sweeping and runs the vacuum. Bless the man, he is also excellent at administering Ibuprofen and cooking comfort food. Finally, went over all the sanded paintwork with a wet sponge and the prep phase was finished. Celebrate small accomplishments.

We have made an executive decision. This is a walls and woodwork project only. We are not going to risk touching the ceiling as they are fragile enough in this house and we are now old enough to resist learning yet another obscure skill.

[irritating tense and personal voice change - so I'm not an English major]

Next came the mess and distress. Find places for all of the extra furniture and things that had moved into the living room. Move the upholstered furniture into the the dining room, roll up the rug and find a place for it, move the big table into the living room to serve as my work table. Spread the floor tarps. Hang a big plastic tarp over the archway between the living room and the dining room. Such total disorder,/ What happened to our comfy home?

Then came the demolition stage. Check each wall to see how many of the cracks in that old old plaster needed the full clean out and re-plaster treatment and which could get by with a simple top coat. Dig and scrape and clean up the mess. Make the first layer of the patch. Wait a day. Make the next layer of the patch, set up the scaffold and start the spot patching. Wait a day. Clean up the plaster work mess and start the prep for the primer paint. Spend a day laying blue tape around the edge of the floor, follow with the protective paper, top with the tarps and invoke the friendly house spirits to guard the hardwood floors.

This year we had the rainy season to beat all, topped off with a hurricane dumping many inches of water onto our already saturated ground. This house was built in the 1930's and a foundation can only take so much hydraulic pressure over time. By the time the rains had stopped the humidity was over 70% on the main floor of the house and there were scary grey spots on my living room walls. I had contractors to visit with no clear diagnosis and a couple estimates equivalent to the price of a semester at the local state college. Lots to think about. We put a dehumidifier in the basement and that helped a lot. No new spots and the humidity in the house came down and stayed down.

Next step, convince the Man of the House that I would have to deal with the mess. Poor fellow really doesn't like change. Really doesn't like change at all. I began the "we're going to need to paint" discussion. OK got that far, on to choosing a color. Pale yellow he says, soft sage green I counter. And on to stand in front a what felt like an entire wall of paint chips. I could see the area I wanted to select from but let him choose first. He pulled his choice and I was able to counter with my range. And he liked the one I was hoping to use. The color has some spiffy name and number in the manufacturers list but we have agreed that what it looks like is a Key Lime Pie made from the bottled key lime juice. It is indeed pale yellow, but it has a soft green shade to it. As the light changes the color varies and we are both pleased.

We've lived here for more than a decade. We bought "real" upholstered new furniture, for the first time in our marriage, for this house. That couch and coordinating squashy arm chair, got my kids through high school and college, in this house with no separate space for recreation. If it happened, it happened in this one living room and dining room. I guess a decade or more IS a long time for soft squashy furniture even if it was from a good manufacturer.

The Rose Damask Couch

The Rose Damask Couch. There it sits, totally unexpected, not quite settled in, like a well dressed woman in an unfamiliar setting. We don't really know each other yet. We expect to become friends, good friends, but right now we know nothing about each other, not where it has been, not how I usually behave. Someone gave The Great Wheel of Chance a spin and what started as a hurricane cleanup turned into a full scale redecoration.