Dearest Love of my Life,
All I ever really want you to do is paint my house.
Really.
Just like Jon Bon Jovi in that movie "Moonlight and Valentino."
You want to turn me on? Just paint my house.
I don't want you to build, or remodel, or support, or install, or plumb. Not that you can't do those things. You can. I just don't like you when you do. I don't like me when you do. I don't like us when you do.
From now on, let's hire things out, and we'll just paint.
Sincerely,
Your Loving Wife

See, we've been under the spell, here, of a stubborn bathroom for nearly a year. We started a so called "cosmetic" re-do at the end of last summer. We always seem to get to a point with our summer money where we know what we can afford to do, but sadly, once we are at that point financially, we are also at the point where our time is compromised as school lurks just around the corner. Last summer we stripped VERY stubborn wallpaper, and painted, a very bright and unforgiving color, over very much not so nice walls. School started. We stopped there. Short of a new vanity and hardware and toilet and flooring. That all would have to wait until later. And it did.

Then, spring brought a sign. A chance to have some help installing the toilet came our way. And we took it. Along with help getting the floor started. But we had to stop there as other responsibilities loomed, and April break brought travel. So new toilet and half a floor it was for several months.

Finally, in this first week off for summer vacation, while the kids went to stay at Camp Grandparents for a while, we figured the time and money were both ripe for just finishing up the job. Quick and simple. Do the floor, vanity and molding. Yet it has been a roller coaster of this that and the other thing going wrong, right down to a faulty gasket in a beautiful, even a little pricey, Delta sink fixture. Yep.

So again, it has cemented my belief that you can only be good at so much on the home front. Tim and I are pretty good in the marriage relm, and have pretty cool kids, so I always feel like we have those areas workingly under control. Then there are the other things that eat up life...work, house and home. We do fine at work, and home too as our place is cozy, decorated comfortably, we keep up on laundry, do fun stuff as a family, and cook great meals. You know what we truly SUCK at though, and I hate that word but it SO fits here, the HOUSE part...as in HOUSE fixing, HOUSE cleaning, HOUSE maintenance...we suck at it all!

And I don't know that we are really all that bad at it. It just is NOT what we enjoy. At all. Either of us. We do what we have to. And we know what we'd LIKE to do TO the house. But it is the actual doing that is like torture. Especially in the summer, when time is available, but books, and the boat, and kids, and good food, and travel and fun calls.

So the next time we get an idea to redo/fix/demolish/update or renovate our pain in the ass turn of the last century farmhouse, it will be a phone call, and I do hope it is Jon Bon or an equivalent look alike that shows up on my doorstep to help out. Tim and Dev will probably be out on the boat, Gwynn and I will be putzing around the house, doing whatever, myself probably watching, happily, from an adirondack chair, sipping some wine and reading a book. The job will get done, family balance will remain as it should be, and all will be right in the world again.

And before that, we WILL finish this ALBATROSS of a bathroom.

But from now on, let's come to an agreement. You, babe, just paint my house:)