Home Improvement, Barks and Bites and House Guests

It's been really busy around here for the last few days. My mother-in-law and stepfather-in-law are going to be in from Montana on Saturday and staying with us. This always seems to snap us out of complete apathy when it comes to home improvement and cleaning. Suddenly, because someone else will be visiting our house, it needs to be returned to some level of order and cleanliness and unfinished projects become glaring embarrassments that need their shame covered up.

Photo: Todd Klassy

The home theater wall nearest the garage was the glaring problem this time around. The entire home theater was originally encircled by a wallpaper border. If you have never dealt with removing old wallpaper, you may not know that the product was invented in the depths of hell and removing it was featured as one of the tasks of Hercules that eventually got edited out as just too scary for readers. Apparently, the people who put this stuff up on the walls used some sort of Cold War era, top secret mega glue to put this stuff up, because it did NOT want to come down.

That, combined with the fact that the room is full of stuff that can't go anywhere else, has led to a slow progression around the room of moving things to the side, venturing into battle with the wallpaper, painting the area and moving the furniture back into place.

Except for the one last wall. It's pretty much been sitting as this beige and green blob in the middle of my warm yellow and "iced tea" colored theater, the leaves in the wallpaper mocking my lack of ambition.

When I finally tackled the task this weekend, it proved one of my personal development mantras that I've been trying to drill into my own head. Most painful tasks are all bark and no bite. All of these tasks that are barking threateningly at us are just not that bad in reality. We let the barking intimidate us because we're afraid of a bite that never happens. In many cases, 5 minutes or 5 hours or 5 days of just dealing with it completely takes care of it instead of the hours, days and weeks we envision.

So, in a matter of 4 hours or so, the wallpaper was down and 3 coats of paint were nearly done drying. Emboldened by my success and already covered in paint (I am NOT a tidy painter), I decided to make use of the aquarium stand that I ended up with.

A couple of weeks ago, I found a good deal on a used 75 gallon aquarium setup. It's all sitting in the garage while I build up the rest of the stuff I need to make it the spectacular project I envision. However, it came with a basic pine stand that was just 2 inches too narrow for what I wanted to fit underneath it. Which, of course, means I'll be building my own. However, that left what to do with the stand I had in the garage.

Enter the gallon of dark brown paint (matches the couch) I bought to see if I wanted to put a faux finish on the "iced tea" color (I didn't). While I didn't want to use it on the walls, it suddenly entered the picture to make the pine stand into the base for my snack station at the back of the room.

So, I moved the dropcloth over, pulled the stand inside and painted it up. It's now sitting in the back, with the refrigerator and pizza oven on top of it. I'll add a bit of a "counter" on the other half and put in the little cabinet also sitting in the garage and I'll have my prep area, popcorn maker, microwave, pizza oven, soda refrigerator and movie library at the back of the room. Almost no money invested, a few hours of hard work and I'm thrilled.

I'm sure my guests won't notice, but they don't need to. They already contributed by being the catalyst. And, I feel a renewed sense of ambition to get some things done this week. I'm downright humiliated by some of the barking tasks that I've been avoiding.