Let me stop here and give you an idea of how our house is set up. It's not a big place; maybe about 1400 square feet overall. It's what the deed paperwork calls an "attached residence" and what we used to call a "duplex": two small houses side-by-side that share a common wall. Basically, it's the housing industry's version of a Siamese twin. The developers optimistically call it a "garden home", but obviously they haven't seen our back yard. The ground floor really looks more like an apartment than a house. There's no entryway to speak of; you walk through the front door and you're in the living room. Technically, part of the living room is supposed to be a dining area, but the Thornton philosophy is that every area is a dining area, so we didn't take up valuable living space by sticking a table and chairs in a spot that was better served by La-Z-Boys. There's a small kitchen just off the living room. The master bedroom is also on the first floor; its door opens directly into the living room area. The one ground-floor bathroom serves double duty as a guest and master bathroom. It even has two doors: one leading out to the living room and another one that leads straight into the master bedroom. The two doors can be very confusing to me when I'm fresh out of the shower, and it's led to some embarrassing moments when we've had guests.
Upstairs are two other small bedrooms and another bathroom. In addition there's an open area that we call a loft, and which serves as my home office and tree house. One of the bedrooms is occupied by my son Ben, the other by my son Sam. Both of them are of sufficient stature to make these bedrooms feel about as expansive as the average accommodations at San Quentin. Curiously, though, neither young man has moved out.
In January of this year, the Thornton home decor status quo was irrevocably damaged. The month previous, we had given Ben a new stereo system. He started setting it up in his room in January and, rather than running seven sets of speaker wires all over the floor, I came up with the bright idea to run the wires through the crawlspace between his ceiling and the roof. I even volunteered to be the one to crawl up there, figuring that, for someone of Ben's size, our "attic" might function like a roach motel... after entering, he'd find that he couldn't leave. We've had the unpleasant experience of a mouse dying inside one of our walls, so I could only imagine the odor we'd face if Ben wasted away up there.
Once I was up there twixt residence and roof, I was very careful to try to step only on the joints or jousts or joists or whatever they call those thin pieces of wood that a ceiling's nailed to. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that it takes the coordination of an Olympic gymnast to make one's way across the latticework above Ben's room. And since my agility quotient is measured in imaginary numbers, it wasn't long before I put my foot through the ceiling of Ben's room, creating a hole where I could feed not only speaker wires, but also whole speakers and farm animals.
I knew that Sue, who has been known to spot the assembly of two or more microbes on a kitchen floor, would inevitably notice the damage to the ceiling, no matter how much duct tape I used. So when I fessed up and showed her the damage Ben had caused, I tried put a positive spin on the situation by saying that, since we had to get the ceiling repaired anyway, we might as well take the opportunity to have the whole ceiling scraped and repainted.
From there the dominoes fell quickly. Within seconds, Sue had explained the logical progression that led inexorably to a major interior facelift. We couldn't get the ceiling painted without doing the walls; painting the walls and ceiling would inevitably lead to paint on the carpet, and let's face it, the carpet needs replacing anyway; we can't just carpet one room, because the house will look funny and who knows if the same carpet will be available if we postpone the rest of the house? And carpeting the upstairs means moving all the furniture off the second story, and if we want to avoid doing that twice, we should have the painting done at the same time throughout the rest of the house. To be fair, on previous occasions we had discussed the logistics of painting and re-carpeting, so it wasn't like Sue came up with the project escalation out of the blue, but it was still pretty impressive that she had the plan at the ready in her frontal lobe, to be produced at the first opportune moment.
And so began Operation Home Facelift, a project that required the planning and logistical preparation of D-Day, but with none of the fun.
As you may have gathered, this was not a do-it-yourself proposition... we knew enough not to give the job to a guy who puts his foot through ceilings, and we wanted the job finished before the colonization of Mars. Sue had the name of an outfit that our homeowner's association had once used to paint the exteriors of our development, so she called The Guy out to look things over. I thought The Guy was basically a Wall and Ceiling Guy, someone we were hiring to repair the ceiling damage Ben had caused, scrape the stalactites off the rest of our ceilings, and paint the interior of the house. But The Guy looked around and told us he could not only get the walls and ceiling into shape, he could replace the kitchen's overhead fluorescent lighting with can lights, paint the kitchen cabinets, put in a new kitchen and entry way floor, replace some other lighting fixtures in the house, and knock out the pony wall by the stairs.
(That's when I learned that a pony wall is the name given to an approximately 3' by 3' wall outcropping that keeps the foot of the stairs from being visible from the living room. Basically, it's a ledge that virtually cries out to have things set on it or draped over it: cups, magazines, spare change, coats, DVDs, etc. I don't know why it's called a pony wall... I don't know why it's called anything, other than a ledge. I always thought it fell into that category of things that you don't really need to know the name of, like the little plastic tips on the end of shoelaces. At any rate, Sue always hated this bric-a-brac magnet, and was ecstatic to be able to order its destruction by name.)
I watched Sue's eyes light up as The Guy described the transformation that could take place if he were allowed to put our household into order. It was as if Mary Poppins were coming to visit. When the time came to say yea or nay to approving the project, I did some quick mental calculations. They weren't of a financial nature, though... instead I was calculating the ratio of the years of nonsense Sue has endured to the amount of time our household would be in disarray, and multiplying it by Sue's satisfaction of finally having walls, ceiling, and floor the way she wanted them. If I put the brakes on this, they might as well add my portrait to the gallery at the Husbands Hall of Infamy.
All material copyright 2009 Chuck Thornton