Describe the most ambitious DIY project you’ve ever taken on.
I’m sitting at the top of the stairs in our first flat. crying. My relationship with Tony is still very new. His mother and step-father are coming from New Zealand for a visit. He’s working all hours as usual, I’m decorating the entire flat to make it nice.
It had been just post 70’s flowery, with a bathroom so pink that Tony commented “I’m glad you’re too young for a hot flush!”
The lounge was the final step and I’d done a mainly lovely job, even plastering a large piece of wall in one bedroom where the plaster came off with the old paper. I popped insulating wall lining on top, papered it, and you wouldn’t have known. Not bad for a first try.
So this moment was not just a shock, it was an outrage! It offended my expertise, challenged my interior design skills, decorating skills, and upended my capacity to think! That was far too much two days before I welcomed mummy to the England for the first time!
I may have been a bit tired too.
The outrage!
I’d been painting the ceiling, needed to pop to the now grey and pale pink bathroom, when I came back the ceiling was all bubbly. I couldn’t work out what I was seeing. Then it started to fall down in clumps.
Did it land on the dust sheets on the carpet? No it had to land in the gap where the leg of the ladder had rucked it up.
Horror! Panic! Outrage! Despair! Fury! For goodness sake woman get something to take that paint-y mess off the carpet and clean it!
Rapid action. Clean carpet. Rearrange sheets to cover floor. Leave ceiling to fall down and sit on stairs crying in case Tony is going to kill you, even though you don’t know what you did wrong and killing you would be totally unfair! And another outrage!
Tony comes home. Laughs, dispenses cuddles, obviously the wrong order but I was so glad to be alive I let that pass! Made me tea, yes tea with two sugars is a great restorative. Coffee just hypes you up to greater levels of hysteria!
I realise we have a friend who is a decorator, he tells me that you put up ceiling boards either for plastering and painting, or for tiling. These boards shouldn’t have been plastered and a second coat of paint was always going to create havoc.
Or in this case something that looked a bit like Australia. In a part New Zealand household! Seriously, Tony loves Auz, but that was tactless of the gods of misrule.
It was a huge lounge, so we went out the next day and bought the largest ceiling tiles we could find, stuck them up, painted them apricot white, and they looked amazing. Fresh during the day and so relaxing at night.
Welcoming Mummy
They arrived the following day, like me Ann follows a spiritual path and she wasn’t into graveyards. The wonderful and much missed Clive wanted to visit his family graves, brother, sister-in-law, parents.
We couldn’t leave Ann at home alone so I took Clive and Tony and mummy had the day together, which nearly cost him his life.
I didn’t mind going to a cemetery as, whilst I feel no need to visit them, I sense my family around me often and I’m grateful for that, so much better to be in contact with that living energy than yearn for a past you can’t visit, I have no problem with helping someone else to do what they need to do.
Plus I felt that Ann, my wonderful soul mother, really just wanted time with Tony. It was all perfect, until I got home!
Thank the Lord for self-control
She cornered me in the kitchen. Told me off that Tony worked so hard and yet today, while he had precious time with her, he had ‘had’ to do the paintwork in the lounge after ‘having’ to do the ceiling days before. I should do more.
Silent raging and fuming followed by instant and highly orchestrated revenge. Forget revenge being a dish best served cold, I can think fast and heat has power.
I marched his mother round the flat: the bathroom I tiled and painted; the bedroom I plastered and decorated; the lounge I painted, with the ceiling I was painting before it fell down, and the tiles I pasted and handed up to Tony, then the ceiling I painted again!
Upstairs to the bedroom with the wardrobes I built, the walls I painted and decorated! The second bedroom, ditto. Tony did help when he could, he always does, but he worked miles away so I got on with it.
Finally, downstairs to the lounge to ask my ridiculous young husband exactly why, when he had time with his mum, was he painting the sodding paintwork and did I ask him to do it? No I did not!
She gave him a right telling off, and we’ve been the best of friends, and more, ever since. We’re two strong women who do spark occasionally if we’re together, in a completely upfront and instantly forgotten manner, but she is one of the greatest blessing in my life and I love her to bits.
So I’m grateful for that whole mess, we may not have bonded so closely if she hadn’t seen that a) I pulled my weight unlike a previous demanding relationship, and b) that I took no nonsense. She knew the Hawken tribe and their stubbornness. Bless them all.
I had a lovely time when I met them, but ten thousand miles and no money for flights, doesn’t allow you to bond closely. NZ is gorgeous though. Such amazing memories.
So there you are, a decorating disaster that led to a 30 year and counting friendship, one where the miles don’t matter.
What’s not to love? I still miss that flat though. By far our best home.
Hope you’ve wrenched blessings from chaos too.
Deb xx
Deb Hawken - Amorah 