The Snowball Effect

Every year, when school ends, we clean.

We do the deep cleaning where we pull out all the furniture, sweep and polish the wood floors, wash the walls and windows, sort out all the kid stuff and pack things away that we're done with to ship off to Goodwill. This year, we planned the same, and then I was going to spend the rest of the summer knitting and hanging out with my kids in my clean house.

This year's cleaning was going swimmingly. We were doing a room every couple of days, I expected to be done with everything by the end of the second week, and then hubby had a great idea. He suggested a road trip to Ikea so we could finally have a grown up bedroom and stop living like broke-assed college students.

"We should get a real bed and a dresser to match," he said. Holy shit. He never says stuff like that. I'd be a fool to ignore that alien call. The two of us trooped off to the Detroit Metro Ikea, leaving our kids to fend for themselves for an afternoon, and had a blast wandering around and picking stuff out. He pushed the cart patiently, and never once complained about being lightheaded from the bad store air. Shocking, I know.

On the drive back, we decided that we should paint the freshly cleaned room (I swear, you could eat off the floor it was so clean) and since we have done lots of cool colors, and the bedroom is where all the action happens, we thought a nice warm color would be nice. After looking a a bazillion color swatches, we chose Firecracker, a nice deep orangish red (I like to call it whorehouse red) to contrast the birch veneer furniture we bought.

That was the fatal error. Recall all the DIY shows where they did red walls. We pushed all the furniture to the center of the room and made a bed cave so we could sleep at night and started cutting in the edges. That was on Saturday, five days ago. Hubby does the rolling, I do the cutting in. We've gone around this room three times now, and today, I'm going to go around for the FOURTH TIME. We took all the advice that the nice man at the paint store had. We primed the walls with grey, we have been patient, and we have painted....and painted, and painted, and painted. Today, we will paint again.

I hate this color now. I want my room back. The house is trashed, our bedroom furniture is out in the hall, in Charlie's room, in my office, in his office. Everything is as dirty as it was the day school got out.

Finishing this room will have consequences. One dresser goes to Charlie, another has to leave the house, we've decided that maybe we want to downsize the two giant wardrobes and get another matching piece. The wardrobes would go into my office for yarn storage (yes, there really is that much yarn).

And now...we're talking about creating library walls in the living room and a crafting area, recovering the couch and moving the entertainment center. I need a desk (I'm using a card table right now), and since the giant oak desk I rescued from school won't dismantle and fit upstairs into my office, I need to find something else. The kids are eating their weight in food every day...

Maybe we've taken on a wee bit too much.