Bedroom makeover faces pitfalls
(Originally published March 2023)
Last week, I decided to turn our adult daughter’s childhood bedroom into a combined craft room and guest room. (I know that sounds cliché, but as an empty nester with hobbies, I’m contractually obligated to do this.)
I had the week off from work, and as I was walking past the unused bedroom on Saturday morning, I said, “I think I’ll paint that today,” in the same breezy way I might say, “I think I’ll thaw a steak for dinner.”
Deep down, I knew it wasn’t going to be that simple. But if I admitted as much, I’d never do it.
I wanted to start with the walk-in closet, which would hold the bulk of my craft supplies. Like the rest of the bedroom, it was done up in a dusty rose color our daughter had chosen in middle school and had since disavowed, with a shudder, as “a phase.” She gave me her blessing to paint over it.
Not only would the closet need to be emptied, but I’d have to find homes for all the stuff I’d been stashing in it. Then I’d have to take down all the current shelving and closet rods that had worked for a teenager’s wardrobe but would need to be reconfigured to give the Michael’s craft store stockroom vibe I was going for.
“As I cut in the aqua paint over the existing pink, the jarring color combination—think ‘Easter Bunny meth house’—almost caused me to abandon the project.”
I moved the contents of the closet out into the bedroom and then tried to remove the shelving brackets Mark had anchored to the walls years ago. I could have asked for his help, but he’d have given me his usual contractor’s excuses about being “busy” with “paid work.” So I took a hammer to the closet and, in a loud and dusty berserker-like frenzy, got all the shelves down myself.
Later that day, I taught myself to repair gaping holes in plaster.
For the paint, I settled on a soft aqua called Palladian Blue. True to form, I started the job by dropping the stirring stick on the floor and unknowingly stepping in the resulting splotch of paint. I then went downstairs to grab a cup of coffee.
While the paint looked lovely against our hardwood floors, on which I stamped medallions of it all the way to the kitchen and back, I didn’t care for it on the walls at first. In fact, as I cut in the aqua paint over the existing pink, the jarring color combination—think “Easter Bunny meth house”—almost caused me to abandon the project. But I persevered, and once the mauve was covered, the Palladian Blue radiated calm.
Decisions, decisions.
The closet itself, as I should have predicted, took all week. That left me just the weekend to do the rest of the bedroom, which was still full of everything I had taken out of the closet, as well as all the surplus items I had casually thrown in there over the past few years.
So instead of spending Saturday doing what I love—giving myself a stiff neck painting the ceiling—I found myself standing paralyzed in a sea of unspecified objects. Finally I began, holding up a mysterious metal bar with screws in it and thinking, “What does this bracket thingy go to? Should I keep it, just in case?”
I set it in the hallway outside the door to await a decision.
For every item I found that had a logical place to go, I faced five that left me at a loss. I couldn’t fathom, for instance, where all these cords had come from. What were they for? What if I got rid of them and then had an urgent need to, say, fire up the ol’ VCR?
To that end, did we still have a VCR? (We certainly had VHS tapes; I found a whole box of them slowly degrading under a broken but fixable table lamp and a ripped backpack stuffed with a tentless tent fly, a 2014 plumbing supply catalog, and a lone caster that squeaked.)
I put the catalog in the recycling bin and lugged the other things into the hallway to deal with later.
For the remainder of the weekend, I made tough calls, hauling each possession to the barn for long-term storage, to a free pile at the end of the driveway, to the newly painted closet, to the trunk of my car for a dump run, or to purgatory in the hallway.
I’m happy to report that I got the whole room emptied, which means I can paint it this weekend.
Unfortunately, the only way in is through a tunnel in the hallway. It’s seven feet high and built entirely of unmade decisions.
