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Claudine is on a push to get our house straightened out. When I say "straightened out", I mean to bump it up to another level of livability. If that's a word. Actually, there are two reasons for Claudine's home improvement kick. The first reason is to fix things that we haven't fixed since we moved in. Tons of little things that need attention that we said we would do right after we moved in. Pulling down some crappy wallpaper. Repainting the bathrooms. Repainting over the duct tape and pen marks on the walls left behind from the Asian family that lived here before us. Stuff like that. And we have been blissfully ignoring all these things in the 2+ years that we have lived here. But now reason number 2 is looming on the horizon. Another baby. This baby is pushing us to get all these things in order before she pushes Claudine to get out.
Bobby has to move out of his room because that is the "baby's room". I'm sure that reason won't fly in the mind of a 2 year-old. There are extensive shrink bills in this kid's future. He's no longer the baby AND he is becoming the "middle" child. And we all know what being the middle child did to Jan Brady. The other reason he has to move out of his room is that it is just butt-ugly. Bad wallpaper plastered over worse wallpaper over garish paint. Three levels of ugly. So we've decided to move Bobby into Jake's room. "Ah", I hear you say, how cute, the two brothers living together". Oh no, that would be too easy. We are moving Jake into my office. We have four bedrooms, why don't we use them as bedrooms? Um.... cause I love my office? It is just as well, 'cause my office has just as many layers of crap on the walls, plus all the damage I did to the drywall by stringing in the cable and the cable. So where will my office go? Into the way too small dining room off the kitchen, of course! We'll never use this room as a dining room. Our kitchen table is larger than the dining room. I can't imagine any event that would require a fancy meal that would need less room around a table than we already have in the kitchen. The problem is that the dining room is just as butt-ugly as everything else. I mean, it has furry wallpaper! You know that stuff from the '70s that has raised area of "texture"? Ugh. The only problem here is that the dining room was serving as Claudine's semi-office and bedroom for when she is on call. So she has to clean out that room of all her junk by Monday so the dudes can come to strip off the nastiness from the '70s and paint the room with a neutral color.
After the guys finish that rooms, I have a small window of time to move all my junk down into the non-dining room so they can redo my former office. The painter/fixer dudes are going to work on the two of the bathrooms. Then they start to work on the (now) 3 kid's rooms. And we have to get all this stuff done before Jake's new bedroom furniture comes. Because it will get delivered right into the newly painted, freshly patched, former office of mine. Jake will make his move into that room (I'm sure that move will be ugly also). Then Bobby will move right into Jake's room and furniture. But the walls will no longer be nasty and dirty but fresh and clean. But still he will complain. Then, after the dudes make the baby's room all brand new, I have to go up into the attic and bring down the crib, changing table and various other baby junk to be reassembled and arranged in the "nursery". I've always hated that word.
It, of course, will suck. I will need to rewire cable modem and phone lines into the "dining room". Which means I will be poking more holes in drywall. Except this time it will be freshly painted drywall. It also means I will be in the basement poking into the ceiling tiles and struggling to crawl into the crawlspace. Which is always a filthy job. But I must do this. Once I've had super-speed cable internet, I can't go back to 56k access. I can't and I won't! And nothing you can say will change that!
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