Home projects – quit while you’re ahead

It seems like every spring, I take on what should be a completely innocuous home project. Usually, this is far enough removed from my last innocuous home project that I have forgotten how badly it went. So it was recently, when I decided to convert a small bedroom into a TV room.

Eventually, I planned to outfit the room with comfortable chairs and some pictures, but I began by shopping for paint, which I pretty much shopped for the way I shop for anything: I went into the store with a vague idea, found something I didn’t hate, and bought it. I also purchased blue masking tape for covering woodwork, new rollers in two sizes because I didn’t wash my last ones well enough, some spackle, a sanding block, and a small brush for painting the corners.

The spackling didn’t go well, for when I was done applying and then sanding it, the nail holes and cracks were still conspicuous. I went back to the store and bought a couple boxes of texturing material for the paint – gritty stuff that would compensate for my inadequacies with a spackling tool.

The texturing material stirred easily into the paint and it covered the imperfections on my walls nicely. My masking had been stellar, and the woodwork caught barely a drop. It had been a pretty good day. That should have been the end of it.

The next afternoon, I showed my handiwork to a friend who agreed it looked nice.

“But you ought to get some really cool paper and put a border around the top,” she said. “I saw some just the other day with ducks and dogs and apples trees – your kind of stuff. It would really make this room.”

I had seen just such a border in the men’s room of a local watering hole, and I remember thinking then how much I liked it. Until my friend spoke up, however, it had never occurred to me that it didn’t have to go above a urinal.

The seed had been planted.

I bought three rolls of the pre-glued border. All I had to do was get it wet and put it up. Simple enough.

What the directions didn’t tell me was that it would not stick to my textured walls, or that it had serpentine qualities when wet that made it curl around legs and arms, turn inside out and upside down, and rip, all while dripping sticky paste down my shirt and the newly-painted walls. Neither did the directions say anything about having to match the pattern when I finished one roll and began another. Having never done this before, I glued the bill of a duck to the head of a black Labrador and the butt of another duck to half an apple tree.

I spent hours trying to repair the carnage, but my vigorous efforts to scrub the paper until it stuck resulted in more rips. While half the trim clung tenuously to the wall, the other half drooped sadly.

I tried Elmer’s Glue, but I kept getting it on the paper border and the wall. Finally, the mess was just too much. I quit. My mistakes had been many, beginning when I textured my paint. I imagine I should have sanded it before application of the border. Perhaps, I should have tried working with smaller pieces of border at a time. Ah, well – spilt milk and all that.

I solved my decorating dilemma by piecing everything back up with the Elmer’s Glue and then erecting bookshelves just below it.

A few more garage sales and I’ll have enough literature for complete coverage.