ThreadingWater

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Guest blogger Kris has this to say:

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The night after I'd removed all the wallpaper (not just the foil front, but scrubbed the backing with wallpaper-glue-removing stuff and scraped every inch of wall with a putty knife) my husband, who was still unaware of my new project, called to say his work had gone more quickly than expected and he was coming home early.

I had harbored an I Love Lucy-ish fantasy that I could get far enough along on the project before he got home that it wouldn't seem so bad. But now that he was coming home early, I thought I'd better break it to him.

"Uh, honey, guess what I did on Tuesday?"

He clearly didn't comprehend the magnitude of furniture displacement until he arrived home, suitcase and computer bag in tow. A man of routine, he made a beeline to the bedroom to put his keys and wallet on his dresser. But it wasn't there. And he couldn't find it because it was stashed behind other bedroom furniture in the living room.

He laughed at first, but it was the laugh of the stunned. When the shock wore off, he was just plain mad. And that's when the wall inspection began.

"You've got a lot of work to do in here," he announced as he ran the beam of a flashlight across the wall near the closet opening to show me the depth of the problem. It was the voice of a guy who knows carpentry (his dad was a carpenter and they did many side jobs together) but also the voice of payback.

And I didn't blame him. He couldn't find his own shoes without asking for help. Worse, he'd come home with his usual relish for sleeping in the familiar comforts of his own bed and couldn't do that, either. (Well, technically he could, since I'd set the matress atop the box spring on the living room floor, but it just wasn't the same.)

I was in the proverbial dog house, known in our household slang as "The Naughty Box." And the only way out was an act of contrition involving premixed joint compound, mesh drywall tape and many hours of sanding. So the Wife Errant began her penance.