Stripping Wallpaper and Unintentional Allegories

Several weeks ago, I had the joy of participating in an Office Spa Day with Inspired Home Office’s Jen Hoffman. Jen is pretty danged amazing … at least based on my experience of her that day and on Twitter. She challenged (in a non-threatening and compassionate way) everyone participating in the Spa Day to choose something to do in their home office space that would make it better. (She says it much better than I am currently doing.) She took everyone through an exercise to find that “thing” and then encouraged everyone to get off the phone and go do it.

As she was sending everyone off for the doing part, I realized I had a problem. The “thing” I’d come up with was not something that could be accomplished in the limited time aloted to it. It wasn’t something I could accomplish in a week of Office Spa Days. 

My entire office needed to be remade

This revelation was simultaneously shocking and disheartening. I thought I was just kind of messy and maybe a little disorganized. Things that can be fixed (or at least helped) by a professional organizer like Jen. But no … her visualization exercise forced me to admit/realize/come-to-terms-with the fact that the whole thing needed to be stripped bare and begun again.

Blah.

Jen was both smart and sweet enough to tell the group that she’d hang on the line a bit, just in case someone was having trouble deciding what to do. I stayed on the line. I was the only one.

Of course Jen was kind and generous and didn’t make me feel weird or stupid at all (I was managing that all on my own, thankyouverymuch). When I told her what I’d come up with, she wasn’t the least bit surprised. 

Great! Now I’m transparent too! LOL

Anyway

For the Spa Day exercise, I put away a printer. I wasn’t really using it, and it was taking up space. So I put it back into its box and into storage. Yes, yes, I’ll do something useful with it, but not just yet.

The bigger deal was having a conversation with my Significantly-Better-Half (SBH) about this revelation and I was duly informed that my SBH was not the least bit surprised either.

(I was later able to determine that no, Jen and my SBH are not in cahoots.)

So measurements were taken and scale drawings were made as I tried to figure out how to either rearrange what I already had, or determine that I needed something new. Yes, yes, I already kind of knew the answer to this, but I needed to do this anyway … I’m weird that way.

What I decided first was that everything needed to be removed from the room and the walls stripped bare.

We live in a wonderful 1928 stone house. Dutch colonial is the style (or so I’m told). Some time ago, a previous owner created beautiful hand-cut crown molding throughout. He also had a thing for wallpaper. Every room was meticulously wallpapered. He loved this house. A lot.

Then he sold it to a family that didn’t love it so much. They painted over wallpaper and splattered some of that paint on the hardwood floors. In the kitchen, they pulled off the wallpaper, but didn’t wash off the glue; they just painted over it. 

We purchased the house from that family. And now we’re trying to love it back into a state of beauty and grace. Part of that has been to remove painted wallpaper bit-by-bit, to expose the virgin horsehair plaster walls.

If you’ve never removed wallpaper before – much less wallpaper that’s been painted over – it’s, well, and “adventure” (which, if this were Naomi’s blog, might be referred to utilizing many four-lettered words). There’s a lot of steam, warm vinegary water, scraping, and cursing involved in the process.

And last weekend, my SBH and I emptied the room and tackled it. 

It took all of Saturday and part of Sunday, but the walls are clean virgin plaster now. Next step is spackling the dings and nicks, then on to the painting. The color I’ve chosen is called Wild Bayberry. I love that name. (I want a job coming up with cool names for paints sometime. ) It’s a nice warmish blue. Yes, yes, I know that blue isn’t supposed to be a “warm” color, but it’s how it makes me feel.

Deal with it.

The Point

This wildly meandering account of my office remodeling process has a point. Honest. It’s that while I was in the middle of scraping the layers of paint and wallpaper from the walls of this place in which I’m working to spend a whole lot of my time in the very near future, I realized that I’m going through a similar process.

In order to make my home office useful, I need to lose some non-functional bits, change out some poorly-designed bits for better-designed things, de-uglify it, and generally make it a cohesive whole that is inviting and the kind of place I want to be.

That’s what I’m figuring out about myself. Some old habits and fears need to be stripped away (and I’m sure there will be cursing involved in that process too), and some new things need to be put into place. Change is scary, but it’s important if I’m going to accomplish anything that I want to accomplish.

The world “healthy” comes from the same root word as words like “hale,” “hearty,” and “whole.” Being healthy means, in part, being whole. At least in a linguistic sense. I think in a practical sense too, but I’m better with the words. 

So that’s the point. That’s where I’m headed. Stripping away things that do not contribute to a sense of wholeness and health. Heck, I may even manage hale and hearty one of these days too!

Oh, and I’m taking pictures of the office in process. I’ll post some once we’re all done. Before and after. Proves that progress is possible and change can be a very good thing indeed.