Mom to the Screaming Masses: If You Want to Stay Married

Forward with Ford - Part 3

When I was growing up, my mom painted rooms all the time. She decided it needed to be a different color, and so she just painted it. No question, no discussion - she just painted.

I happen to be married to a man who is just a bit of a control freak and he's also just a bit of a neat freak and he wants things done in just the right way. Most of the time, I'm cool with this - if we do any kind of home improvement, he takes charge and it ends up being perfectly done. It might be a bit of a cranky time between the two of us, because I'm maybe not so detail oriented, but it all works out well in the end.

Except for those times that I decide to do it all by myself.

So my kids upstairs bathroom was so, so cute when we first moved in. I'd found this great border of rubber duckies, it was blue and yellow. We painted the bathroom in two colors - bright gold/yellow on the top and a medium blue on the bottom. But then the toilet leaked and we needed to replace the floor - and my husband, curiously enough, bought a white and black check.

Which goes with nothing that was in the bathroom. (insert picture here! - oh, wait, I can't - it was ON MY CAMERA!!!) It was bipolar and discombobulated and the dark colors made the very small bathroom look miniscule. I'd replaced the really cute ducky curtain with a white liner when the first curtain ripped, and the liner was discolored and hanging crookedly.

And then someone decided to peel off parts of the border, and so it looked a bit, well, derelict. And I saw a really cute shower curtain at Target - it was a Peanuts cartoon, in black and white, with a red border. And just like that - I knew that the bathroom needed to be redone.

So I broached the idea. And it was summarily shot down. He didn't feel that it was necessary and it was too much work and yadda yadda. When he went to work one day, I just decided to go to Home Depot, buy the paint and get it done.

(I'm buying myself this t-shirt.)

I did post on Facebook:

Twitter update #1:

First up: removal of the peeling border. I tried to peel it off, but mysteriously it didn't peel off in the nice strips I'd envisioned. So I did a little google search and found that there are all!new!products! designed to remove wallpaper easily and effectively.

So I ran to Home Depot and bought the product, along with a gallon of white paint and a half gallon of red. My grand plan was to paint three walls white and one wall red.

I told the clerk what I was trying to do and she told me that I'd need primer under the white paint - but the red paint was going to be just.fine.with.no.primer.

Here's my Twitter update from THAT:

Yes. I did the white paint and it was great. 1 coat coverage, 2 made it perfect. But the red paint was totally a different story. I did a second coat.

And then I sent Allegra to the store with my debit card and the lid from the paint can (stuck in a baggie) and told her to get a half gallon of the same paint WITH the primer.

I did a third coat with the new paint, but it glumped and clumped and no matter what I did - one area of the wall just didn't get coverage. By then, I'd been painting for, oh, something like a hundred hours- or maybe just NINE. My neck hurt. My arms hurt. I hadn't eaten anything. And so I hung UP the new shower curtain. I laid down the new rugs.

And I just gave up.

My husband came home, took one look at it and said, "Well, I guess I should know better than to tell you no, huh?" What proceeded to follow was not all that pretty and was not aIl that fun. And then I woke up the next day and I left for Detroit. Which meant that I was, in essence, leaving him with a bathroom that needed some pretty major work - on a day that I was going to leave town for three days and leave him with the kids. I mean, I'd done three walls perfectly. And the red wall was in essence cut out and prepainted - so he'd just need to do a final coat. What more could one person want?

He called me that night and we exchanged yet MORE(!) unhappy words about the reality of painting the bathroom - he'd not yet started on it but was planning to that evening - and he was full of detail on how I'd screwed it up and made it look terrible and it was going to be a MASSIVE undertaking for him

and I hung up on him. I'm so grown up, I know.

The next morning brought a different tune. He was full of Oh, you did such a great job! as well as You saved me hours of work! and the ever popular I would have never been able to get it done without all of the work you did!

And so now we have a fantastic bathroom.

Evidence to support to defendant's case below: (Not a very high quality, but I HAVE NO CAMERA!!!!!!)