Old Story Retold: A Wallpapering Adventure

(Originally from 10/4/2002)

I have a wallpapering story to tell. It is long, but not as long as the living it.

Mona and I are remodeling our house. Some rooms need a lot of work, but the living room is not one of those. All it really needed was to replace some old wallpaper. A simple, weekend job, right? Not when there is a Hamby involved!

Mona and I spent 3 hours in Home Depot looking at wallpaper for the living room. We could not find anything we liked. When Home Depot kicked us out that night, we were frustrated and exhausted. However, we did decide that we wanted some sort of burgundy stripe with green and/or gold accents. And we knew the style we wanted: sort of classical European, but not too formal if possible.

I went online to a great wallpaper place called decoratetoday.com. I did a search for striped wallpaper. I got over 31,000 striped wallpapers. Ohmigod, WAY too many! So I searched for burgundy stripes. I got 2,940 wallpapers. OK, it will take a while, but I can go through these since they show thumbnails 20 at a time. After another 3 hours, I had narrowed the choices I liked down to about 20. Time for Mona to look at them.

Mona and I narrowed them down to 5 after discussing for about an hour. Hmmm, maybe our parents can help. Call them up and invite them for dinner. Amazingly, my parents are nice enough to drive one hour to look at wallpaper. Do they love me or was it just because food was involved? After printing out pictures of the 5 wallpapers (with accompanying borders and matching alternates for the hallway), we taped the pictures to the wall and further discussed them for another 2 hours. Mona’s mom, by the way, thought we were all nuts and went home shortly after dinner.

Finally we decided on the “right” wallpaper: a nice burgundy strip with a classic fig-leaf design on a light marble background. How nice! We all went to bed happy.

The next morning as I stumbled out into the living room, I looked up at the wallpaper picture still taped to the wall. Yuk! Something is just not right. But I didn’t know what. I mentioned it to Mona. After dodging her screaming lunge at my head, she looked at the wall herself. She sighed and quietly said “Whatever.”

I should now mention that Mona had employed the classic Hamby technique of scheduling a party to force remodeling to be done by a certain date. Mona, while not born a Hamby, is well on her way to being “completely assimilated” as Star Trek’s Borg race would say. Mona’s party was only one week away by this point. One little “catch” about the wallpaper was that it was out of stock until next month. Now one would think that out of 31,000+ stripped wallpapers, we would be able to choose one that we liked AND was in stock. You would think so, wouldn’t you? Nope, we liked this. So Mona decided to paint the room for the party and we could wallpaper it afterwards.

Now by this time, we had already torn off the old wallpaper and painted the room TWICE with Kilz. The living room was a nice clean white. Good enough for me to live with for a month. But I love my wife, so I said, “Sure, honey. Go buy a can of paint. The cheap kind, please.” And off she went. She came back with a paint a lovely shade of 'Dusty Rose' (to quote the paint company).

The boys were in trouble and grounded. Nothing unusual about this, I guess, but in my anger, I had added “…and I’m going to work your butts off, too!” to their punishment. So I told them to paint the room. Big mistake. If you have ever done had a teenager work on a job he did not want to, you know that they are experts in making simple jobs long and complicated. A one hour pain job, turned into an all day affair. In the process, I spend far longer teaching (read “yelling at” ) them how to paint the room than if I’d done it myself. When the boys found out that they were painting a perfectly good white room only to be wallpapered within a month, they complained non-stop. But finally they got it done.

Mona and I stood back to admire our new, if temporary, living room walls of ‘Dusty Rose’. Almost immediately and with all the clarity of the kid in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, one of the boys commented “It looks pink!” The trouble was, he was right. And not a nice pink, either. A nasty pink-that-is-not-supposed-to-be-pink pink. It looked like a teenage girl’s room.

So back to the hardware store, Mona went again to get some “accent” paint. Another $15 and she returned with yet another wonderful color the paint company called 'Sunset Gold' (or something like that). She pulled out her brush and began to paint on gold accents to “tone down” (her words) the bright pink.

Now I am no artist, but something tells me that if you take a pink wall and paint yellow marks on it, it will get brighter, not “toned down”. After Mona finished her hand-brushed “accents” (which are foot-long sweep marks across the wall), the room no longer looked like a teenage girl’s room. It now looked like a toddler girl’s room.

Every marriage needs a bit of diplomacy occasionally. And just then, mine needed plenty. “What do you think?” asked Mona. What was I supposed to say? “It looks great”, I said. “…if everyone at your party is under five years old!”, I thought. I would have pulled it off, too, if my face had not given me away! (The traitor!) You all know how the rest of the conversation went…. “You don’t like it.”...“It’s not that I don’t like it; it’s just that…” …and so on. The scenario played out as expected; and in the end, Mona was outside pissed off and I was feeling really like a dirt-bag.

The pink had to go. I called the boys in and told them to repaint the room with the gold paint. Ever told two teenage boys that they had to redo a job that they did not think should be done in the first place? I do not advise trying it. Now their complaints of “You are going to wallpaper it in a month!” and “What was the matter with white?” were louder and more obnoxious. Two high points, though: they painted the room in less than an hour the second time, and it looked much better in gold.

The next day, online wallpaper store sent me an email. (This is a story about wallpapering, remember?) It said essentially that the hallway wallpaper has become available, although the living room wallpaper was still out of stock. And, by the way, a 24-hour wallpaper sale with free shipping was going on and wouldn’t I like to order my wallpaper today to take advantage of it? (I am such a sucker!)

I sat down to order the wallpaper which everyone agreed was the prettiest. But something about it….. Hmmm, here is the same wallpaper in blue with red and gold accents. Isn’t that pretty…. “MONA! COULD YOU COME DOWN HERE FOR A SECOND?” In the end, after looking at over 3,000 wallpapers and spending 8-10 hours, we ordered the blue one within 15 minutes of seeing it. But it was in stock!

We moved all the furniture into the living room. The gold paint looked good…really good. In fact, a little too good. I knew I was in trouble again when Mona pressed up against me, caressing my arm, smiling so sweet, and saying “Honey, I really like the gold. Do you think we could cancel the wallpaper?” Well, fine, except that she waited 2-3 days before deciding that.

This morning some really pretty blue-stripped wallpaper arrived in the mail. Anyone thinking about wallpapering their living room? I hear it’s really easy.