This Post is Making Me Crazy!

As you may know, we are in the process of selling our house. We knew it was time to sell because we had run out of renovation and redecoration projects. The house has now been redecorated into a state of absolute perfection… rats, time to sell.

Whenever Andrea has her interior decorator over, I know two things are going to happen: I’m going to put in a lot of effort on a project I don’t care about, and life is going to get a lot less convenient. The secret to interior decoration is to pretend no one lives in your house. Of course, four people live in our house, two of whom are small children, so it’s a serious inconvenience to pretend we don’t.

When the decorator re-did our kitchen, all of a sudden everything was off the counter – napkins are now stored in the knife drawer and must be replaced every third day or so. The kitchen table now sits on a textured rug with groves that are perfect for trapping mushed peas and dried Play-Doh. I have the handyman skills of a trained monkey, and break into cold sweats at the thought of hanging a towel bar, but somehow I inevitably end up assembling IKEA shelves with Swedish instructions and three key parts missing.

Andrea moves from room to room in a house and grumbles “we have to do something with this [name of room]. It’s making me crazy.” Andrea is made crazy quite often; in our existing house she worked her way through the kitchen, family room, dining room and basement.  So after months of Andrea saying “we have to do something with this mud room,” I knew I was in trouble.

For the uninitiated, the “mud room” is the small room where we enter the house from the garage. Andrea calls it the “mud room” without irony, which is odd since no mud would ever, ever be allowed in there. Perhaps “mud room” is short for “room for items which formerly had mud on them.” It’s where the washer and dryer sit, a utility sink, our coat closet, and a shoe cubby. There is a crummy white wire shelf above the washer dryer that holds all manner of junk – washing stuff, obviously, along with some tools and wrapping paper, for example.

Basically, the mud room ranks right above the utility room where we keep our old paint cans on my list of places I could give two flips about its appearance. But it’s made Andrea crazy so now it is time for renovation.

And so, despite my apathy about this room, and my aforementioned lack of handyman skills, I’m suddenly hanging pictures and assembling drawers for inside the closet. The wire shelves are still there but are decorated in a sea shell and sand motif. And from now on, to get a hammer, I have to use chopsticks to remove it from a 14^th century Ming Vase.

With the mudroom complete the house is complete and it’s time to sell. The new home is theoretically perfect. But I know that soon enough, Andrea will be grumbling that “this [garage/pantry/walk-in closet] is making me crazy!”