How I spent my Lazy Sunday…from Pine Cones to Easter Eggs…

Normally Sundays around the Cheese house is pretty lazy. We like to stay in our PJs catch up on the word jumbles we missed during the week. Watch a movie or two. Not this Sunday--this Sunday I spent my lazy afternoon going toe to toe with the wall paper border in my master bathroom. I have been putting off this task for weeks, this and a pending root canal. But I couldn’t stand it any longer. I found it confusing to wash my face in two geographic regions every night before bed: the beach and the forest. It was hard to feel the calmness of the palm trees pictured on my walls without the TACKY ASS PINE CONE wallpaper border coming into view. Friends, this was not your average run of the mill straight lines 6 in thick wall border. But wall paper actually shaped as pine cones, each individually dropping from the ceiling in all of their sticky sappy glory. Hey, we all have our own tastes, and if I bought a log cabin in the woods in say North Carolina I may have chosen something similar … OK maybe not. I know they say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but the last tenants of this house must have thought that deer antlers and moose motiffs were a site for sore eyes. Judge for yourself.

So I begin my task and start to free the bathroom of this cabin crap and its shame…I am dumbfounded to see that these pine tree lovin’ people, glued on the wall border on first THEN painted around it. So now I am struggling with both cheap wall glue and paper that had been adhered under a coat of olive green paint. If you have ever stripped wall paper, you feel my pain. Yes, I realize that I am only peeling a border, I cannot imagine if I had to peel the entire wall. Actually I can imagine, and I wouldn’t be doing it. I would instead take a road trip down to the border and load up a couple of “day laborers” in the back of my minivan, pay them each $50 and a case of Orange Fanta to do it for me.

So where the Big Cheese was during the ordeal? Laughing his ass off that’s where. No, he was at work, but I still felt his presence, snickering and smirking over my shoulder. A little voice in the back of my head, “This is what you get for all of those half baked schemes (sponge painting the bathroom red) and thousands of holes you have put in our houses in the past.” So I guess I am a bit notorious for having little patience when it comes to home improvement tasks, I am more a big picture kind of gal. When I want to hang something I “eyeball it", lick my finger, place it on the wall where I want the nail and ta- da , done. If I have to measure distance I just spread open my arms wide and I use the grease from my forehead to mark my nail spot- just a little head bump is all it takes. I mean, who needs a measuring tape or a pencil? I am pretty sure my arm span is 3 to 4 feet in width, and if the pictures or curtain rod comes out crooked, toilet paper works great if you ball it up and stuff it where you need it. And the red paint and a sponge...it seemed a good idea at the time, the first wall looked great, but the other three, well let's just say I got a little bored. But I digress.

Today my punishment definitely DID not fit the crime. So "I" spent "my" lazy Sunday afternoon trudging in Satan’s forest equipped with only a spray bottle of vinegar & water, a old brown towel and the mouth of a sailor. (I would have made Jeremy Piven blush, I was so livid). And this is what my bathroom looks like now, not to mention that it smells like a giant Easter Egg. Where on earth do I go from here? Maybe I'll grab another sponge... I mean Seriously Why Can’t I ?