My Bedroom Renovation

Sneedy & Bunny,

As you two are the only folks from the Girlfriend E-mail Club who have been intrepid enough to have actually  slept in my bedroom, I'm addressing this e-mail to you.  Each of you had fairly firm opinions when you first entered.  Nicole's reaction was to grab two large plastic garbage bags and start heaving in clothes from my closet.
  

Me:  Wait!  Not that!  Dave gave me that suit.  I made out with two women on New Year's Eve at the Claremont hotel in that suit!

Sneedy:  I see that it's a 42L with a waist of 34 inches.  You're never going to wear this thing again.

Me:  Not that suit!  We had one of our first dates with me in that fine three piece charcoal pin stripe suit.  Remember?  We met at the Compass Rose Bar in the St. Francis Hotel.  I was resplendent in my pin stripe three piece and you were strikingly beautiful in  your navy blazer with the gold buttons.  After our date we descended to the Union Square garage to fetch our cars.  I had decided that it was way past time for our first kiss.  I grabbed you and drew you to my bosom and laid one on you.  I could feel your heart start to beat so rapidly I thought you were going to faint.  Later, on the way home, I thought to myself.  Hmm I bet that means something...  You want to throw that suit out?

Sneedy:  You're a dirt farmer now.  Our courting days are over and you're not going to wear this thing again.

So I lay there on my bed and watched, dumbfounded, while Nicole, without a shred of sympathy or sentiment, proceeded to empty most of my closet into the garbage bags.  Anything with a 34 inch waist was history.  Most of my collection of dress shirts were also eighty-sixed...  I managed to save my lovely colorful Hawaiian Aloha shirts from the wrecking ball but not much else.  Bunny's first reaction upon entering my sanctum sanctorum was to remark:  "Hmm, smells kind of Hamsterish...".  But out of loyalty to our relationship she stuck it out in that bedroom for about a year.  Then one morning, after we'd got engaged, she woke up, looked at me and decided I was spectacularly unsuitable as husband material.  She moved out soon thereafter...

       So, without benefit of the feminine touch, my bedroom slowly, over the years, turned into the cold, dark and moldy man cave I've been sleeping in.  Sometime ago my brother warned me that he could smell a lot of mold and mildew in there and perhaps it was time to renovate.  Since the Colonel owed me a bunch of money and he is our resident maintenance man, I put him to the task.  He has been simultaneously working on the wall outside of my bedroom and the bedroom itself.  When we (by which I mean several day laborers ...) had dug a trench, exposing the lower part of the outside wall and the underlying foundation, we found exposed siding and rotting foundation timbers.  Apparently the big stone chimney, sitting on a concrete pad, had been the stoic sentinel that had been holding up that side of the house for all these years (it was homesteaded as a dairy farm in 1935).  After that part of the outside wall had been revealed I noticed that I could see outside through the floor in the corner of my bedroom; and also from my closet.  Eventually the opening was large enough for smallish wild varmints to crawl through, if they had a mind to.
  

When I brought this to John's attention he started to work on the inside.  "Colonel, I want to completely renovate my bedroom.  We've (you) gotta wash down the walls and ceiling with a chlorine bleach solution.  We'll repaint with anti-fungal paint.  We need to re-floor the northwest corner and replace the crumbling panels of sheet rock.  There are numerous cracks in the rest of the sheet rock that have opened up as the house continues its downhill slide into oblivion...  We need to mud and tape those cracks again.   I suspect that this old rug that has been in here for thirty three years has absorbed its share of mold etc. and needs to be cut into pieces and removed.  When we're down to bare floor we (you) can thoroughly wash it with bleach and reseal it with some kind of anti-fungal floor sealer.  I'm gonna just go with a nice area rug between the bed and the bedroom door."

The finished product.  Yes, I live simply so that others may simply live.  Notice the Indian themed wall hanging.  I believe I'm supporting a single mother, dwelling in the Mumbai slums.

A framed picture I've my dear mother;  Georgia O'Keefe and an antique dresser; note new rug with geometric pattern.

 

The Colonel rose nobly to the challenge in front of him.  My dear friend and compatriot John Troutman lives in part of the out buildings adjacent to the garden.  He has cobbled together a humble (and I do mean humble) abode that we refer to as The Hacienda.  I won't describe it here for fear of offending the ladies...  I call John The Colonel because his last name is Troutman.  In the Rambo movies Colonel Troutman is Rambo's boss, apologist and advocate.  "John, if you'll just do this one last mission, I promise you'll be released from breaking up this rock pile and be returned to civilian life."  "Colonel Troutman, you're the only man I trust"  That happened to be the longest bit of dialogue Rambo uttered in the movie.  Since I like to give those close to me nicknames, my John became "The Colonel".  The Colonel waded into the challenge of my bedroom remake with gusto and fortitude.
  

Over the years, my bedroom had become a repository of all kinds of flotsam.  This had to be removed so John could attack the walls and the ceiling.  Some stuff has been moved outside of the house and the rest has been moved around in the bedroom.  Currently, the bed is in the middle of the room with stuff piled high on the portion I don't sleep on.  My file cabinet has been moved to the closet, rendering it temporarily inaccessible.  There is paint and old paint chips along with myriad construction debris littering the rug everywhere.  I have a nice navy blue long sleeve tee shirt that was lying on top of a pile of clothes on the bed.  I put it on the other day and noticed what looked like rust spots on it.  I finally figured out that some of the bleach used to clean the walls had splashed onto the shirt and also on my SF Giants World Series Champs black hoodie. tsk tsk...
  

Now when I go to bed, I carefully pick my way through the debris and gingerly lie down, making sure the pillows don't fall off the bed since it is no longer pushed up against the wall.  Reclining in bed with my nighttime sleepy bye book propped on my tummy, I can't see the floor.  I can, however, gaze on my beautiful new cleaned, spackled and painted bare walls.  It should be informative in the next year to watch the cracks in the walls and ceilings come back as this old house continues its slow, inevitable, downhill slide.  Like a man clinging to a tree in a flood, I rely on the chimney to keep me from floating away.  When all the eggs have been broken and the soufflé is finally served, maybe I will have a limited viewing for those of you who were so intrepid as to spend time in my bedroom, all those years ago.

Love and kisses, Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres