I couldn’t wait for Christine to come over to see what I’d done with her main bathroom.
“Your main bathroom,” her friend, Tina keeps saying because I can’t get used to the idea that this is now my bathroom and not Christine’s, the person who sold our us new house in Franklin.
A few days after we moved in, I asked my realtor if she could put me in touch with the seller so I could ask where to find the emergency water shut-off. The seller, Christine texted me right away and told me she’d love to come over and give me a whole tour of the ins and outs of the place. The next morning, she and her friend, Tina came to the front door.
“It must be weird knocking on your front door,” I said as I ushered them in.
“It is, but I am so happy to meet you and give you the low-down on the house. Thanks for letting us come over,” she said.
“I live just three doors down,” Tina said. “So if you ever need anything, just let us know.”
It turns out that Christine is staying with Tina and her husband, Mark three doors down until she finds a condo or townhome to purchase. And it turns out that Mark and Tina helped with much of the renovation work in the house before Christine put it on the market. All three of them were glad to hear that I would be continuing on with the improvements the trio had begun in 2020. I looked forward to completing the trim work in the bedrooms, running electric out to the shed and hopefully refreshing the main bathroom. I told Christine that I loved everything she’d done with the house and that I was left with just enough projects to make it fun but not stressful. I do love a project!
“There’s a lot of love in this house,” Christine said, looking around, before she left that morning. “And I’m so glad that you’re the one who bought it. I can tell you’ll be putting more love into it.”
With Christine’s blessing, I began in the bathroom, tackling the awful eighties wallpaper. I managed, with great difficulty to get a two-foot section scraped off, just to discover another layer underneath. I had worked almost one whole day on that section and had somewhat succeeded in getting the top layer off, but also ended up gouging little holes in the drywall. I have a little bit of experience removing wallpaper and I knew this would be two weeks of my life down the drain. If I were thirty years old, I wouldn’t hesitate. But since turning sixty, I count each precious moment in my life. Wrestling with drywall is not how I want to spend them. (Also, I had whacked off the old ceramic towel bar and toilet paper holder with a hammer and didn’t know how to patch the craters they left.) Time to call in the professionals. I found a painter who would patch the holes, take care of the loose edges of the wallpaper and paint over it. I didn’t want to spend a fortune on it because we will eventually gut it and put in a brand-new bathroom. I only wanted to not see that wallpaper.
The seventies vanity was a perfect little project for me. I got Chloe on Facetime – what could I do to make the pinkish/beige laminate countertop look acceptable? The beige floor linoleum was okay and the speckled seventies tile in the shower I could live with. But it was going to take just the right color to pull all of this together.
“How about a blush?” Chloe asked, then immediately started shooting me links from Pinterest, Apartment Therapy and Instagram. “Then you could do a brushed gold light fixture like this…” more texts, links to West Elm, Amazon.
“Yeah, that’s a great idea! Then maybe I could spray paint these old pulls and knobs the same gold.”
Over the next two days, while the painters patched and skim-coated and sanded and primed and painted, I worked on my vanity. After collecting every paint sample resembling pinky peach, I found the perfect blush color and had the nice lady at Lowe’s tint their special cabinet paint “Romance.” I removed the doors and the hardware, sanded everything, then primed and painted. Then I wondered what the hardware would look like if I cleaned it up. I knew gold spray paint would not hold up on bathroom pulls. Ted sent me back to the Lowe’s for Brasso and after hours of scrubbing, Deb assured me that they were adorable.
Having my team available by Facetime made my task way more fun. When the painters left and I put everything together, the room was so stinkin’ cute! I was tingling with excitement.
“Christine,” I texted. “You and Tina have to come down and see what I’ve done with the bathroom.” I knew Christine had been dying to renovate that bathroom but had to use her funds on the foundation or somewhere boring like that. She had told me that Tina was so glad I was getting rid of that wallpaper.
It took two days for them to walk down to see my masterpiece and by that time, I was getting nervous. What if they didn’t like it? What if it was actually ugly and lame and I didn’t know it? Christine, Tina and Mark followed me into the living room, then into the hallway.
“Okay, guys,” I said, pausing for effect. They crowded behind me to see into the dark room, and turning on the bathroom light, I shouted, “Ta da!”
Christine and Tina literally jumped and gasped. Their eyes scanned the room as they exclaimed over one another, oohing and ahhhing in amazement. Just the response I was hoping for.
“When you said pink, I was a little skeptical,” Mark said, peeking in the door while the ladies caressed the rosette hardware and asked questions. “But this looks nice.”
“I can’t believe you made this old bathroom look so good for so cheap,” Tina said.
“Show her what you did to that table you got on Facebook Marketplace,” Christine said.
“Come look,” I said, leading them down the hall to the third bedroom. “When we went to pick up that $60 sofa, they guy told us he was moving in with his girlfriend and had to get rid of all of his stuff. When he and Nick started to pick up the sofa, I cased the room and asked if there was anything else he wanted to unload.” I told Tina how we pulled in the driveway with a mattress, a rug and the table, all free. I had cleaned the desk up, sanded it and added a couple of coats of tung oil. And voila! Nick was using it as his desk.
“You got this for free? Wow,” Tina said. I had seen a rustic painted coat rack at Tina and Mark’s house that she made from an old door. “You’re a girl after my own heart.”
I realized these guys don’t know me very well yet. They don’t know that making old items look new again is one of my favorite things on the planet. It’s in my blood. I learned from the best, my mom, who was a wizard at buying furniture from auctions and thrift stores and estate sales, working her magic with paint and accessories and creating beauty from castoffs.
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” she taught me. The antiquing technique was popular when I was a kid in the seventies, and I watched Mom turning our crummy little brick ranch into a lovely home with her skills. Mom antiqued everything she could get her hands on. But when I got old enough care about my bedroom furniture, I insisted on regular “brown” furniture like all my friends had. So, she helped me how strip the old chest of drawers and vanity she had bought for pennies and painted antiqued yellow for my previous pre-teen bedroom. She did it all. She wallpapered, she removed wallpaper, she painted, she made velvet drapes and hung groovy amber pendant lights. She helped me paint my room yellow and orange while Stacy wanted the weird combination of lime green, black and purple with some white fur thrown in somewhere. She showed us how to make it all work.
I too love a castoff, the challenge of transforming something ugly. When I started creating my own home after Chloe was born, I followed in my mom’s footsteps, refinishing dressers, painting folding chairs from Goodwill, tearing wallpaper down, painting accent walls. I shopped at thrift stores and gladly accepted hand-me-downs, working my own magic in every home I landed in from North Carolina to Los Angeles.
“You take after me, Leslie,” my mom told me when she was helping me paint a dresser in North Carolina. “Stacy likes everything new, and Heather doesn’t care one way or another.”
In our first home, I tried to let Nick help me with a project. When we were expecting Chloe in 1989, Nick’s mom and dad let us move into a little duplex house they usually rented out to college students. Marie had the whole thing painted for me before we moved in, but I found the cutest wallpaper to use in the bathroom. Black and white cows on a khaki background. (Ted raised his eyebrows skeptically, but I bought it anyway.) When I showed it to Nick, he told me that he had been employed hanging wallpaper in New York before we met. I knew he had driven a limo for one day before being fired but didn’t know he had worked anywhere requiring any skills.
I bought all the supplies he’d need and set him up to work in the bathroom. I checked in on him a few times in the first ten minutes to see if he needed a hand. He was already sweaty and frustrated, doing more pulling off than applying rows of adorable cows.
“Do you need help?” I asked him.
“No, I don’t need help, I need this f*+%#ing wallpaper to stick to the f#+&*ing wall,” he said.
“Aren’t you supposed to put the glue on the back and then fold it over or something?” I asked.
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” he asked, trying to hold up one end of the paper to the wall while he squashed the remainder of the roll underfoot.
“I thought you hung wallpaper in New York.” I stood in the doorway with my arms crossed.
“I worked for a wallpaper hanger,” he said. Turns out he just held the ladder or something and had then been fired from that job after a day. He’d never actually hung any wallpaper.
“Do you want me to hire someone to do it?” I asked.
“I don’t f*$#@ing know, Leslie,” he said. “Do you care if it looks like shit?”
“Well.” I paused. “Yes.”
He reached up with glue-covered hands, started pulling at his own hair and screamed, “Nothing’s EVER good enough for you!”
These days, Nick runs when he sees me tearing anything down or dragging anything in. Even his friend Mark knows how crazy I can get.
“Oh no,” Mark said when Nick told him we’d made the offer on the house. “Let me guess, it needs major work? Leslie needs her projects.”
But there’s one little problem. As I said about sewing in the last post, I do not have the temperament for this sort of work. If the last couple of posts give the impression that I’m some sort of domestic goddess because I like fixing things up, that would be highly misrepresentative. Everyone close to me can tell you that my projects drive me crazy. I get kind of obsessed, totally focused and intense until I get it right. If anybody needs to talk to me, they get yelled at because I’m impatient and anxious until it’s finished. But at the same time, I enjoy the physical work that always balanced out the cerebral gymnastics of raising kids and teaching fitness and dance. There’s immediate gratification when it’s done. And it’s creative in its way, satisfying somehow.
Yesterday, Christine sent me a text about a piece she found on Facebook Marketplace, including a link to the picture. “With a little bit of work, it would be great beside your bed.”
“Oh…..” I texted back. “The perfect piece for chalk painting! I wonder if he’d take $75 for it?”
Yes, I will continue to count each precious moment of my life and try to resist wasting any of them on stressing out. But the little thrill of excitement and accomplishment that ran through me when I stood back and admired my blush vanity, those are the kind of moments I want to welcome. All I need to do is change my personality a tiny bit.
