BATHROOMS BY DESIGN

When it comes to interior design, my idea of sprucing up the look of a room is to pick up the underwear off of the floor.

So, when my wife decided that there were three rooms in our house that needed to be redecorated, my response was, “Why? I didn’t leave any underwear in those rooms.”

But my wife had bigger plans, and it was to start with the downstairs bathroom. To me, this bathroom was fine. The plumbing and light worked, which are pretty much the basic criteria that need to be met, in my book. Apparently, my wife’s book has many more pages in the bathroom chapter.

My wife told me that she was going to do the bathroom in a Tuscany look. I told her that this sounded pretty neat, but I had no idea where we would get elephant parts. At that point, I learned that Tuscany is actually a place in Italy, and this was going to resemble the styles of Italy. I told her that we did not live in Italy, so it may look out of place. She sighed. She sighs a lot.

I decided that the best way for me to help with the bathroom was to go do things in other parts of the house. I began to grow somewhat concerned when I saw my wife lugging big tubs of joint compound into the house. For those of you not familiar, joint compound is a kind of putty-type stuff that I use to fill holes in walls. That may or may not be the intended purpose, but that seems to work for me. Regardless, my wife was carrying about a gallon-and-a-half of it into the house, so unless she had just driven the car through the bathroom wall, she was up to something that I would be best served by ignoring until completion.

Of course, curiosity got the better of me, and I asked my wife what she planned to do with all of that joint compound. She told me what she was going to do with it if I didn’t get out of the bathroom, so I decided to let it slide.

After a few hours of working on the bathroom, I was called in to provide an opinion. I don’t know why she still bothers to ask my opinion. It would be far easier for her to give me my opinion and let me repeat it back to her as if I had created it myself. I surveyed the bathroom, and saw that my wife had used a putty knife to spread joint compound all over the walls. Now, had I done this, I would have been criticized for doing a sloppy and uneven job. But somehow, when she does this type of thing, it actually looks cool. It had this stucco look to it, kinda like, well, something in Tuscany, I suppose.

I was told that this was just the beginning, and that she still had to paint it and glaze it. Glaze is something that, outside of donuts, is foreign to me, so I again went off to parts away from the work in progress.

A few days later, my wife was finished and I was brought back to give a final opinion. And I have to say, it looks really cool. It’s got this reddish-brown color to it, and it just looks neat. My wife says it looks “rich,” but I can’t say that a painted bathroom looks “rich” and still feel like much of a guy. Cool works fine, thank you very much.

I was happy as a clam that she was done, and I could move on to pretending to have opinions about other projects. Not so fast, I was told. The joint compound and paint and glaze was just the start, I was informed. Why, she had merely painted the background. Mona Lisa still had to be put on the canvas. Because goodness knows a bathroom wall without a bunch of knick-knacks nailed to it is a crime against humanity.

My wife dragged me to a home decor store to look for things to put in the bathroom. It was at the store that I did one of the most impressive feats ever performed by me: I helped. I actually went shopping with my wife and was of some use. I found some wrought-iron pitcher looking thing and said, “Hey, honey, this kinda looks like it would go with the bathroom, yeah?” My wife took the item, surveyed it, and looked back at me with a look that said, without a doubt, “Who are you, and where is my husband?”

So we now have one room down, and two left to re-engineer. And, unfortunately, these are big rooms. As before, I will defer to my wife to figure out what we’re doing, when we’re doing it, and, most importantly, whether or not I like it.