It was a great idea gone wrong.
Our bathroom was too plain for my taste and I needed to make it more interesting, more inviting.
I looked for decorating ideas in magazines which were laying around my home. Better Homes and Gardens did nothing for me. Neither did the kid’s Highlights. But then I saw it: the stack of old National Geographic magazines.
“Wouldn’t it be cool to wallpaper with photos from these magazines?” I thought to myself. “It would be a great big collage of the most spectacular photos ever taken! My children would be surrounded by images of the world they live in as they brushed their teeth!”
I plotted my course. Once the difficult part of cutting out the photos was finished, it would be a simple matter of using wallpaper paste to glue them on the wall. Then I began cutting. And cutting. And cutting some more. Our plain-Jane bathroom wasn’t huge by any standard but considering the size of the images I was dealing with, it took about three weeks and seven years worth of National Geographics to have enough material to cover the entire bathroom. My right hand was functioning with the strength of a wet noodle by the time I was finished. My determination to create a masterpiece, however, was as strong as ever.
I should probably mention that I kept this project quiet and worked on it while Darren was away at his job. After all, the most brilliant ideas are often met with resistance and the last thing an inspired woman wants is someone saying “Um, that’s not such a good idea.”
The first picture went up by the toilet at the eye level of a man who stands to urinate. It was a picture of a naked native woman from some tribe in a South American jungle. Her heavy breasts rested on her knees as she cooked an unidentified piece of meat over an open fire on the jungle floor.
“That will soften him up to this whole idea” I thought as I applied the second piece of the puzzle. “This is going to be so cool!”
I worked on the application for a solid 8 hours, and tried my hardest to finish before Darren’s arrival. It’s much harder to have objections with a completed project than one that is half done. I glued my last piece on a spot above the showerhead just as the children shouted “Dad’s home!!”
“DAD! You should see what Mom did to the bathroom!!” cried my little Benedict Arnolds. I heard him say “Oh boy” as he walked through the front door. I felt like Lucy Ricardo in that moment. It was the same as Ricky coming home to find Lucy hanging by her toes out the kitchen window…
“Ricky… I mean, Darren, now don’t get angry but I changed the bathroom a little. I made it into a bathroom slash art gallery. Come here and see!”
I won’t repeat what Darren said since this is a family-friendly site, but he did manage to ask a pertinent question:
“How are you going to prevent the humidity from peeling this s*** off the wall?”
Um.
It hadn’t occurred to me. My creative balloon began to deflate.
I grabbed the phone book and found the number to the local hardware store. I dialed *67 in order to block my number from their caller ID lest they learn my identity and post my picture on the “Housewives with Bad Judgment” bulletin board which hangs behind the counter:
“Thanks for calling ACE Hardware. How may I help you?”
“Hi. I wallpapered my bathroom walls with magazine clippings of naked natives and now I need something to apply over the top so it won’t peel off when we shower. Do you have any suggestions?”
“Let me guess. You did this ‘project’ without consulting your husband, right?”
“Yes, but…”
“I thought so.” he said dryly. “You might want to use a marine spar varnish since the conditions are so humid.”
“Marine Spar varnish?”
“Yeah. Just make sure you use it in a well ventilated area. It’s not typically used indoors.”
I waved my middle finger high into the air at his demeaning tone, thanked him for the tip and hung up.
Marine spar varnish it was.
I drove 30 minutes out of my way to make my purchase in order to avoid having to make eye contact with Ace Hardware Man. Four hours and millions of dead brain cells later, I stumbled out of the bathroom and declared “It is finished!”
Three weeks later, Darren sprang his own little surprise on me.
“We’re going to sell the house. I found a property with much more land and a much bigger house, but we’re going to have to list quick. This property won’t stay on the market long.”
“What do you mean? I don’t want to leave my bathroom now!” I whined.
“Yeah, so you’re going to have to make the bathroom plain-Jane again.”
Despite my pleadings and bargainings, since Darren had no part or say in my “brilliant” idea before it began, he graciously declined to become involved at this point. He told me to figure it out on my own. Forthree hours I scraped away a whole dime sized piece of the artwork before deciding that I needed professional help.
I dialed Ace Hardware’s phone number and immediately recognized the voice on the other end.
“Thanks for calling Ace Hardware. How may I help you?”
“Um. Hi. A month ago I wallpapered my bathroom with naked jungle women and then varnished it with Marine spar varnish like you suggested. Do you remember?”
“That’s not really something you forget.”
“Yeah. Well, I need to take it down. Do you have anything that will make it easier to scrape off?” I said with a cracked voice.
“Yeah. I have an idea but we don’t carry it at the store.”
“Like I’d buy it there anyway!” I chuckled to myself.
“Could you tell me what it’s called?”
“Sure. It’s called Dynamite.”
He started laughing right about the time I hung up.
It took me three full weeks, a box of bandaids, 2 sheets of drywall, tape, mud and one gallon of plain Jane paint before I stumbled out of the bathroom and declared “It is unfinished.”
I learned Life lesson number 4,127 from this experience:
Good hardware store men are hard to find. And so is dynamite
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