Design ideas welcome

But don't ask me to draw, or talk to me about wallpaper

“Well, wallpaper is definitely back” my wife Susan said as she looked up from thumbing through a design catalogue that had come in the mail.

She said it with the slightest hint of a grin because she knows my opinion of what I believe is the vilest accessory one can have in one’s home.

It has been scarcely two years since the last vestige of it came down from the walls of the dining room in our 1980s house. I told Susan then (very kindly, I might add), as I will reiterate now: there will never again be paper adorning a wall in a house I own.

I disclosed with great detail my feelings about this subject some years ago in one of my Home Page columns, still available here if you would like to read it. (I don’t know if it is legal for me to post that link, but as the saying goes, I’ll seek forgiveness rather than permission.)

I received some hilarious emails after that column, almost 100 percent from husbands who could relate and who told me stories of some pretty serious marital conflict, both from hanging and removing wallpaper.

One suggested we meet for beers so he could tell me more. Obviously, he needed to talk to someone.

But I felt ill-equipped to help this reader. Fortunately, a fellow columnist was a licensed marriage and family therapist, so I pointed him in that direction.  

I wonder how often people in the counseling profession have had to mediate disagreements between spouses over home remodeling or renovations.

A couple of hypothetical examples I can imagine:

“Junior has gone to college, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable that the rocking-horse wallpaper we hung in his room before he was born now be removed,” a tearful wife might say.

“Knock yourself out,” Junior’s father might say in response, “but I told you 18 years ago, when you insisted I hang it, that I would not be the one taking it down.  You need to learn, once and for all, I mean what I say.”

Or:

“What’s wrong with having my trophy elk over the fireplace?” a husband might ask, looking for sympathy from the counselor as he recounts with a gleam in his eye his best hunting trip ever.

This is as his wife rolls her eyes for the umpteenth time, vowing no dead animals will become a theme in their home.

As Susan and I contemplate some changes to our kitchen, I do not anticipate conflict unless she happens to throw a curve ball and suggest wallpaper. I am confident she knows better.

More likely, we will both become stressed and overwhelmed over riveting decisions such as paint color, hardware, or whether a cabinet has inside or outside hinges.

We have always had a bit of a problem with vision, which is why we never built a house from the ground up or bought a fixer upper.

We have already taken a baby step with new shelves in the pantry, which previously had those awful wire ones. When yet another one became detached from the wall from the weight of its contents, we decided to have someone build sturdier, wooden ones for us.

I talked to my buddy who owns a handyman business who, remarkably, still takes my calls.

He said he would schedule his crew to build the shelves but needed me to tell him what we wanted.

“I want new, wooden shelves in the pantry,” I told him.

“But I am not a designer,” he said patiently. “You need to sketch something out for me so we will do what you want.”

I think he used the phrase “capture your vision” and that’s when I became queasy.

I told Susan. It did not go well when each of us tried to draw something.

The kind handyman and his wife, longtime close friends, were over for dinner. All four of us ended up in the pantry which is, at best, the size of a standard sized closet, discussing what it might eventually look like.

Slowly beginning to sweat, I kept coming back to, “I just want sturdy shelves.” But my friend – who is probably about to start blocking my calls -- was not having it.

“I am going to need a drawing by the time the guys get here to do it,” he said, with the date about a week out.

“Maybe we just forget it,” Susan later said to me. We had begun to feel our joint blood pressure rise after each of us had drawn some lines on pieces of paper that looked like something one of our grandchildren had drawn for us to display on our refrigerator door.

But in a stroke of good fortune, our daughter Maggie arrived for a visit a few days later. We told her our dilemma, and within 15 minutes, she had designed the new pantry shelves. She included these cool slots where we can put cookie sheets and cutting boards, something Susan had described but, for the life of either of us, neither of us could commit to paper.

I took a picture of Maggie’s drawing and texted it to my friend. He responded with a thumbs up.

The day the workers arrived, they taped Maggie’s original drawing to the pantry door and used it as their guide. Two days later, we had some beautiful, sturdy, and efficient pantry shelves.

Susan articulated some more ideas during Maggie’s visit, and she made more drawings for further kitchen renovation.

Because we don’t rush into big decisions or expenditures, that is as far as we have gotten.

But I suspect, so we won’t end up in a therapist’s office, we should get on with it before someone in this marriage says something about wallpaper being “back” as part of kitchen decor.