Old Dog Learning New Tricks

Shamelessly stolen from Megan Hills at mycartoonthing dot com .  Because if you know TheQueen, you know she does not decorate. She is even less likely to redecorate. She wants her stuff put in place and left there for eternity.  Like a flowing mane of hair, taut abs and other things she has long resigned herself to doing without, decorating is not part of her CV. In fact, furniture buying and renovating fill her with dread. TheCastle is perfectly fine just the way it is for just the way things are. (think "Pawpaw always said ...")  At least, this is true right now - while she's still werking and goes to her lovely office 5 out of 7 days a week.

The thing is - she won't be werking forever. Not too far over the hill, although still a ways to go, is

And all that private space she's had, all these years, in her office, at werk, will belong to some other lucky person and TheQueen will have to find a place to play with her toys somewhere in TheCastle - where ThePrince (Consort) has been strewing his stuff about since 1992!

Uhhhhh. So not happening in this space.

Thus, while I'm still able to escape the madness of a building project, I'm hoping ThePrince  will make some additions to our space. First off is a downstairs bathroom into which geezers can get their walkers and wheelchairs. Wide doors, smooth shower stall, maybe even a flexible vanity top. That way we can move our bedroom to the first floor and I can have that old bedroom for a studio - where my toys don't have to be put away so that we can sit down to dinner. The pleasure of leaving a sewing machine AND an easel set up and ready for play sounds like pure heaven to me.

Of course, such a shift means all the public and joint recreation stuff we do in the den-but-future master bedroom has to be done somewhere else. And that is why, as we slide into our geezer years I am pushing someone to make this house bigger.

but

or should I say

BUT

I do not want this construction project to end up being a deconstruction project. Let it not be the seismic shift that splits a 45 year old relationship apart. We nearly came to blows over the bathroom renovation of a few years ago and every day I have to listen to his complaints about the finished room - now, at last, made of new enough components that it can be cleaned. It fits me just fine but he complains that the tub is too short, too shallow, the shower head is uncomfortable and the sink is too small. I have to go into my head- buzzing white noise space whenever he gets going because, honestly, the bathroom is just fine. It's just not the old bathroom which had been built with second hand tub, tile and a formica counter top.  Old is the operative word - because anything that came before is better than anything that could possibly come after. (that is the first trick this old dog ever learned when it came to ThePrince)

ThePrince and I play well together but we have never worked well together and renovation is very hard work. Also - we have different taste - and we do different things in a house. But this time I am going to learn some learn some new tricks and the first one is to not care what we end up with but to let him build anything he wants. Though he has different taste, he does have good taste. He is the scion of a family of quite notable decorators. All H-family women can decorate. I just have to trust that he won't go off on too wild a tangent as this project unfolds. Now that I think about it - none of my talented sisters "decorate" and even though my artist mother could have been a decorator, she was not so inclined either. We would never go to a furniture store and select a "room". We are far more likely to assemble pretty things we've made or collected in artistic, if eclectic, groupings and besides, I love the old family furniture given to me by my mother-in-law.  I love the stories they tell, even if they don't all go together.

And so I have told ThePrince that the job of choosing for this new bathroom is his. Actually, I told him that he had good taste and I trusted him to select lovely things for this new bathroom. And honestly, I will like whatever he picks (even if he does use the old faucets from the renovated bathroom that he cherishingly stored out in the tool shed).  What I want out of this project is a studio for my toys. And the first step to having a room of my own is to get a bathroom downstairs - and a living room off the end of the house - with a guest bedroom over it.

Because in a few short years I will be here all day long and as it is right now - there's no place for my toys in this house.