Back Around the House II: Mission accomplished

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There we were, two weeks ahead of schedule, with furniture everywhere it shouldn’t be, including providing a cat habitat on the front porch.

I decided to look on the bright side. Our schedule was not all screwed up, we were simply ahead of it.

Our son arrived with his crew. They began to unload the equipment he deemed necessary to straighten out the hasty patch job done on one ceiling 35 years ago.

I’m not sure what I expected, but, I was surprised to see the eight by four sheets of drywall. “What’s that for?” I asked.

“To cover that mess. We need a whole new ceiling,” he informed me.

Since he was not involved in the activity which caused the ceiling to crumble all those years ago, I refrained from replying sarcastically.

It is nice when one of your kids is doing a professional job for you. When I hire somebody I feel like I should stay out of the way so they can get done. But this time, I was the Mother, not the customer. I could watch and question whenever I wanted because I knew the signs which indicated it was time for me to make myself scarce.

In a short time the ceiling was up and they were on their way out. “If that stays up, we’ll be back later to paint and finish it up,” he said as he went out the door. Apparently having parents for clients gave the professional the opportunity to experiment with new methods.

For a while I sat on the new plastic covered loveseat in the dining room waiting for the new ceiling to drop. Then I remembered, as the oldest of our children he always thought it was his responsibility to play with my mind.

Another week or so passed, and with the help of different family members, we got a lot of “little jobs” done which were necessary to the final success of this mission.

One evening as we got into the Jeep to go out to eat, again, my very tired husband said, Oh I forgot to lock the front door. (I didn’t use quotation marks because those were not his exact words.)

He immediately concluded it really didn’t matter if the door was unlocked because everything was sitting out on the porch or in the yard anyway.

It was at about this time I began to reconsider the three paint samples spread on the walls of the rooms to be repainted.

We had already decided that since they were separated by fairly wide arches the rooms should be the same color. In fact we decided many years ago that when we did it this way the area looked larger.

We had narrowed the choice down to three shades of pastel teal blue with splotches of each in the three rooms. But by now one seemed too dark, and another was too bright and the third one did absolutely nothing for me.

Again I tossed the fabric swatches around the rooms with the carpet samples on the floor.

I asked Bill’s opinion. “They all look green to me,” he offered.

“No, they’re supposed to be teal blue!”

“Okay, they’re blue. Pick one!

Back to the sample books. I tried to remember if they looked darker or lighter when the whole room is painted. Finally I decided on a very light teal blue.

Bill looked at it and said, “Good, get that one. It looks just like the ceiling!”

“No! The ceiling is white!” Things were definitely beginning to heat up.

“I don’t really care what you get, but pick out something because in two days they begin putting it on the wall,” he ordered.

So I directed a prayer to whatever Saint is in charge of paint colors, and I called the painter and told him what to order.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This column was first published in the Greenville Advocate on May 10, 2000.

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By Kathleen Floyd

Back Around the House II

Kathleen Floyd is a volunteer citizen columnist, who serves The Daily Advocate readers weekly with her column Back Around the House II. She can be reached at [email protected]. Viewpoints expressed in the article are the work of the author. The Daily Advocate does not endorse these viewpoints or the independent activities of the author.

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