Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we discuss scraping wallpaper off the walls both physically and metaphorically.
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Like any good wife, I woke up three weeks ago and decided I needed to change something about the house. The next day, we ripped the carpet out of the girls’ rooms upstairs and prepared the walls, ceilings, and doors for new paint.
I don’t think this was even on my husband’s radar at the time. It’s not that we haven’t talked about the work needed to update their rooms since we bought the house three years ago, but nothing actionable has happened in that time. So I forced our hand. Now my husband had to help me choose paint colors, buy supplies, and do the manual labor required for us to install the matching hardwood flooring we put in downstairs.
It makes me giggle when I think about it. The look on his face in the beginning made it pretty clear that he was not a willing participant in this remodel. But he’s told me several times since we started the project how happy the girls will be once their rooms are done. He’s right. Every day a little more is done to finish them off, and you can feel their excitement growing as they get closer to moving back in.
While construction is underway, we have them all sleeping in one room. I’ve always been a proponent of having your children share bedrooms. We purposefully bought this house because of the two rooms with a jack-and-jill bathroom. I wanted them in close proximity to each other as they grew up. It forces them to be close, to learn to live with someone else constantly in their space, and, in the quiet hours of the night, to have each other to share their hopes, dreams, and little secrets.
At night we can hear them playing cards and laughing so hysterically that it’s infectious. Inevitably, my husband has to get up and tell them to knock it off.
“Girls, come on, it’s time for bed!”
Through the giggles, they say, “ok” and settle down. We know their “playtime” will continue a little longer, but it doesn’t really matter to us all that much. He just tells them to go to bed because that is something parents have to say when it’s way past their bedtime. In reality, we both could listen to their chatter for hours with smiles on our faces. It’s always a good sign to see that your kids are happy.