By the time you read this, the holidays will be just about here. And I am proud to say that after years of becoming delusional during this time, my husband and I have finally learned something.
“What is that?” you may ask. We’re no longer trying to do it all.
Stop laughing; I’m totally serious.
Hey! I mean it!
You know how I know that we’re finally learned from our mistakes? Because a week before our annual Christmas party, I said to my husband, “You know, if we really push ourselves, we could get the spare room painted.”
“And why would we want to do that?” he asked. “All we’re going to do is cram all the stuff that we have to take from downstairs into that room so that we can put up the tree and the decorations.”
Instead of immediately jumping in with all the reasons why he was mistaken and how we could do this, I took a page from Charles Dickens and revisited a Christmas past…
About six years ago, my husband and I decided a week before our annual Christmas party that it would be smart to put down a new floor in our kitchen. Why? We had hated the old one for the 10 years we had been in the house, and we thought that with all the hustle and bustle of the holidays, we should start a major home improvement project that we had never done before.
Basically, we had gone insane…
My husband borrowed a heat gun from his brother because we needed (okay, let’s be truthful here, he needed) to take up the existing floor. We figured getting these tiles up would be a piece of cake.
We were wrong.
Sunday afternoon, we decided to begin this project (note to self for the future – start these projects first thing in the morning!). My husband called his brother to ask him a question. He asked how long we had been working on the floor. “We just started,” my husband said. “Oh,” his brother answered.
This should have been a sign.
See, my brother-in-law is the MacGyver of home improvement projects. If we gave him a stick of gum and a paperclip, he could build us an addition on our home.
So if he answered with a surprised “Oh,” we should have known that something was very, very wrong.
It took about four hours to get the old tiles up. This put us into early evening. Okay, we could still do this.
We were so delusional.
We began laying the new tiles. We got a lot done. But because we decided to lay the tiles in a diagonal formation, to make the room look bigger, we set ourselves up for “tile border hell.”
After laying the main parts of the floor, we had lots of areas along the perimeter of the room that needed specially cut tiles.
Note to readers: having to cut tiny pieces of tile to fit an open spot on the floor and match the other tiles’ pattern at the same time is really hard.
Really, really, really hard.
Way too hard for us to be starting on a Sunday night—the Sunday night before our Christmas party the following Saturday.
That first night, my husband and stepdad made me go to bed because I kept whining about how we should never have started this project in the first place.
It was either send me to bed or find a way to bury me under the kitchen floor.
They stopped on the project at 2:30 a.m.
But, alas, it wasn’t done yet.
They worked on it Monday night. And Tuesday night. And, Wednesday night. Finally, on Thursday night, it was finished.
It was great! The floor was done, and it was finished before our party.
But, we still hadn’t done a dang thing to get ready for said party, other than the floor.
Ah, yes, ghost of Christmas past; I remember you well. And that’s exactly why I decided that we should wait until after the party to paint the spare room.
I mean, we could always wait until the week before our first summer cookout…
Michele Wojciechowski, when she’s not completely shocked that she didn’t start stripping wallpaper or some other crazy home improvement project a few days before Christmas, writes “Wojo’s World™” from Baltimore.