The Real Home Office DIY Story

Yesterday I wowed you with the pictures of my newly transformed home office.

Wowed you may be a stretch of my imagination, because I suspect some of you may have squinted your eyes and muttered “Cray-Cray.”

Who?

Not us!

Regardless of our mental status, there’s a back story I didn’t tell.  Now, you know there’s always a back story with me.  I go all Lucy Ricardo on myself sometimes.

I painted, hung triangles, and gathered my items for my gallery wall including a pair of ugly brass chickens who look as though they’re about to be in a chicken fight.  I put them on opposing walls, because I don’t want to have to put myself between the chickens to break up a fight.  That should be a given.  (In case you care, I bought the warring chickens in our favorite little coffee shop/junk store.)

What I did not do was hang the pictures for my gallery wall.

I’m bad with measuring tape, rulers, levels, basically anything with numbers on it.  I go to hang one 8×10 picture and half my wall ends up looking like swiss cheese.  I may have compromised the stability of our house after my very temporary (extremely ugly) cheap-o collage in the dining room.

So, I asked FringeMan to lend a hand and a screw gun.  He screws everything to the wall.  Everything.  He also uses really long screws.  Nothing ever falls of the wall, it cannot.  It’s got a four inch spike through its heart.  That’s the way he operates.

However, FringeMan has taken a vow of sleeplessness until our children are finished with college.  At this rate, he may never sleep again.

My daughter recently announced that she not only wants to be a doctor, on humans and pets alike, but she wants to be a surgeon, because she’s good at sewing.  She sewed herself up a little stuffed pig and the pig has a blanket and an object in his mouth that resembles a pacifier, but the entire hand-sewed collection is made from one of her teacher’s old socks, so it’s hard to tell.

Right.  Surgeon makes perfect sense.

After church on Sunday we stopped at the grocery store for sandwich stuff, because although I declared Sunday’s soup days, our schedules got a bit turned upside down and I didn’t have a car to get to the grocery store.

In my town’s infinite wisdom, they decide to tear down our little IGA market and build something bigger and better, a store that carries ten varieties of corn starch, because we all lack choices in our little lives.  They’re currently running about six months behind schedule on this project, so we have to schlep all the way to Walmart to get a lemon.

By the time we made our turkey sandwiches, FringeMan was showing signs of being zombified.  He still grabbed his screw gun and gave the whole gallery wall his best shot.  All was splendid until the very first picture jumped off the wall and crashed into the floor.  It broke into several pieces and we just stood in shock.  Then I noticed a large gouge in the wall.  In the white wall.

You’ve gotta be kidding me.  I thought.  This NEVER happens.

Then I put FringeMan to bed and we started the process all over again three hours later.

All my husband wants for Christmas is a nap, but unfortunately, I’m pretty sure he’s going to be working on Christmas.

Now that this story is told, I’m completely forgetting my point and wondering if I had one at all.

Maybe it’s just that all that glitter’s is not gold, even though two days ago I said it was.

There’s always, always a back story.

Thankfully my back story includes a really fabulous FringeMan.