The real reason for home ownership

I would like to submit Exhibit A for evidence that I do not learn from experience.

This week, we painted our bedroom purple. It had been extremely dull before. Imagine a white carpet (plush), white cheap panelling, white curtains and a white drop ceiling. Strew liberally with excess papers, clothes that didn’t quite make it into the dirty clothes, bedside reading and shoes, and you have a pretty good view of our bedroom. I paint this word picture because what I do NOT have is a single solitary PICTURE of our bedroom. Not from the home inspection, not in the move-in pics, not in the two years we’ve since spent in the house. Brilliant. The very best I can do for you is this picture of a recliner I’m trying to offload:

Bo-ring!

Having painted the boys’ rooms fantastic colors (green for Grey and blue for Thane) the utter blah-ness of the color scheme became even more noticeable. And my mother-in-law kept asking what project we wanted her to do when she came up.

I vaccilated between the lilac color I actually wanted and the sea-green in our attic which is rather more grownup than the lilac color I actually wanted. I kept hearing in my head the commentary of the guys on “Sell Your House!” on HGTV wondering for a national audience just WHAT these people were thinking?!?! Then I realized: screw them! I’ll paint it a boring color if I ever want to sell the house!

A very short time later, the walls became a spectacularly warm and joyful color of purple, thanks to the hard work of my mother-in-law.

But wait! There’s more!

Our house was built in about 1900 — an era when women actually sewed clothes and 6 or 7 outfits was a plentiful wardrobe. (Well, or so I imagine.) For that era, the closets aren’t that bad. This means that they are tiny and few, but do exist. My clothing collection is, er, perhaps larger than necessary for strict modesty even granting our lax frequency in doing laundry. (Ok, ok, it’s outrageously large. But, er, so it is.) This has lead to me putting my hanging clothes in Thane’s room and the upstairs room. And this, in turn, has lead to me wearing many of my fun clothes less often because I forget they exist. Also, it’s cold on winter mornings. I’d had a plan for quite a while, but building on the energy of my MIL we took a trip to IKEA. And lo. We returned with a wall worth of wardrobes.

A shockingly short time later they were assembled. And then they were populated with appropriate clothings.

There are finishing touches left. We plan on putting curtains over the wardrobes (doors were expensive and we couldn’t get the ones we wanted in the size we wanted — I think curtains will be fun. And if they’re not, we can always go back for the doors.) We need to, you know, clean up the room.

But voila! Much more storage and much less boring!