Under Construction

I traded several e-mails with assorted friends before the weekend, as we all discussed what the next three days would hold for us. A couple friends were heading up to their family's cottage. Others were going to the beach. Others were hosting parties. I was pretty sure my parents would want to have a barbeque at some point. But the general theme running through all of these plans seemed to be rest and relaxation and a fun kick-off to the summer season. Oscar and I? We thought it might be a good idea to get embroiled in a really nasty, dirty home improvement project, and run around at a breakneck pace until we started snapping at each other out of frustration and fatigue. I can't think of anything that sounds better than that...can you?

When Hotass moved out of the house, Oscar asked me what I wanted to do with the room that had served as her bedroom for a year. We have no plans to have a second child yet, so we don't need to convert it into another child's room. We considered creating a play room for Turtle, to get all of his toys out of the living room and so I could simply close the door on it when I didn't feel like making him clean up the mess. But given how desperately Oscar needs an office with a door, we decided that ultimately, the room would be much better put to use as Oscar's base of operations.

Before we could move his desk, files, computer, etc. into the room, however, some work needed to be done. Like getting a better lighting situation worked out in there. Currently, there is one 3-light fixture (think track lighting) up on one wall of the room, and it doesn't brighten the room much (not to mention the fact that it's ugly as homemade sin.) And of course it needs paint. It's one of the few rooms in the house that we haven't freshened up since moving in. And while we were thinking about it, the popcorn ceiling needed to be removed.

Of course, Oscar had planned to do a lot of this work while I was in New Jersey last, but for many reasons, that didn't happen. So I have been needling him and harrassing him for the last several weeks, trying to figure out when we could get all of this done, partly because I'm excited about him having his own room, but mostly because I'm tired of listening to him whine about how he needs his own room. Finally, as we were discussing our plans for the weekend, we determined that we could make quite a bit of progress on these projects in a three day weekend. And so, a plan was born.

We'd scrape the popcorn ceiling off on Saturday, install the lighting on Sunday, and paint, if possible, on Monday. How's that going, you might ask? Well....we scraped half the ceiling yesterday. We weren't sure what size the room was when we purchased a drop cloth to help deal with the inevitable mess that comes as part and parcel with taking a ceiling down. So we purchased a 10' x 20' drop cloth. Should be sufficient, right? Except that the room is 10'1" x 11' and we couldn't figure out any way to make it fit over the whole floor without a lot of cutting and pasting. So we decided we'd just go buy another drop cloth. We might have been able to finish the rest of the scraping last night, but we had Hotass's housewarming party to go to, and in the end, neither of us had the energy to worry about it when we finally got home.

We scraped the rest of the ceiling this morning. Then, Oscar spent most of the rest of the day back and forth between the bedroom and the sauna-like crawl space above the bedroom. His friend came over to help us install the lighting tonight, and as of this moment, we have working canister lighting in our front bedroom. On a DIMMER SWITCH! I can almost hear the choir of angels singing. The painting, on the other hand? Well, that's just going to have to wait. I don't think either of us has the energy to deal with that tomorrow. Because even though Oscar had the hot, dirty, difficult job today, I had to deal with Turtle. And even I had to call in reinforcements, just to be sure my kid lived to see his third birthday.

On the other hand, how can I really complain about what a pain in the butt these toddler years are when he does something cute like this:



Do you see what he's doing? My kid is vacuuming up little ceiling bits. Oh, yeah, baby....slave labor starts early in the Cymber household. If he's going to be as big of a brat as he was today, he's going to start paying his way somehow. (Oh, and I know I vowed not to post pictures of my child on this blog, but being as you can't see his face, I'm thinking I don't need to worry about the paparazzi showing up anytime soon.)

So long story short, our weekend is consisting primarily of some Home Improvement 101, with a little Toddler Management thrown in for good measure. And miraculously, we're all still alive. Please feel free to pray that stays the case.