Room

A few years ago I got it in my head that I needed turn my art/music/junk room into a dedicated writing space.  I had become tired of lying about on my bed or the couch and typing away.  It was just so unimaginative, so pedestrian, and just a bit lazy.  Moreover, laying down to write in a cozy bed or couch has some obvious impacts on productivity for someone who loves to nap as much as I do.  I was similarly dissatisfied with the small writing space I had cleared out in my art room amidst the canvases, paints, and spare mannequin head.  How could I write like this, I wondered?  How could great literature be born in such a disorganized shambles?  And so I lugged all my junk downstairs and began to set up my arting area with the mice and bare insulation and the two unicorns painted on the walls that came with the house when I bought it.  The unicorns weren’t necessarily WHY I bought the house, but I would be lying if I said they didn’t nudge me in that direction at least a little bit.

The spare room now cleared out, I dragged in the antique desk I had stashed in the garage and searched high and low in our little town for the perfect second hand armchair to curl up in.  Something still wasn’t quite right, and it wasn’t just that the armchair I eventually found was shockingly large for such a small room (it literally takes up a quarter of the room. That’s a lot of armchair).  Looking around the cramped room I realized just how much I hated the fading peach colored walls—all four were the same tepid, rank shade of nude that seemed to hover in oppressively at you until you started to feel dirty just looking at it.  And now, with my huge greyish armchair taking up so much space those walls somehow looked ever grosser.  How, HOW could I ever possibly write in that?  The room was much as it was when I bought the house, and had suffered the same fate as the rest of the 70 year old space, wherein kind-hearted  but apparently blind octogenarian had painted over wallpaper throughout.  You could even still see the pattern of the underlying wallpaper faintly shining through, taunting me, heckling me, beckoning me to strip it down and paint or paper over it in some fresh inspiring designs.

So I searched online and poured obsessively through home and design websites to get a sense of what I wanted in this increasingly sacred space.  Calming green forests, vibrant waves, and bright flower patterns all jumped out at me but still, nothing felt quite right.  And then, finally, I came across the perfect wallpaper!  It was called Royal Pipland, and what a beautiful and whimsical little pattern it was, combining bright green fields, spacey blue sky with clouds, and cute little hot air balloons whimsically floating by.  Now THAT would be a space to write in!  I checked the price and nearly shat myself.  That “cute” wallpaper would cost nearly $1000 per wall.  And last I checked there were 4 walls in that room.

Nonplussed, I charged ahead.  I can paint, can’t I?  At the very least I could paint this, there being no faces to speak of (which are, sadly, a weak spot for me in painting.  All my faces end up looking like some kind of drunk Modigliani type characters, in a creepy, not artistic at all kind of way).  The only people in this mural were tiny figures stuffed into the hot air balloon baskets, so tiny they are just a suggestion, really, of people.  Armed with a new focus and knowledge of what I was going to create in my sacred Room, I set to work getting the walls ready for painting.  After assembling all the tools (wallpaper scorer, putty knife, spray bottle, etc., etc.), drinking some tea, checking out Facebook, and watching a few episodes of Gilmour Girls I started picking at the first wall.  I ran the wallpaper scorer all around and around, admiring the loopy designs it left.  I cheerfully sprayed some water on the wall, relishing the gentle mist as it brushed my face.  And then I started scraping with the putty knife.  At first nothing happened.  That wallpaper and paint was really on there.  I sprayed some more water, ran the scorer around a few times, and tried chipping away again with the putty knife.  This time there was a little bit more give and a few flecks of paint and paper came away, but certainly not the long sheets of paper as I had imagined.  Again and again I scored and sprayed and scraped.  The scorer broke, scattering pieces all the room.  I got down on hands and knees on the floor (a place I was soon to become all too familiar with), found the pieces, and managed to fit it all back together.  And for those of you who might be wondering why I didn’t just use a wallpaper remover spray, it’s because I have birds in the house and they are even more sensitive to chemicals than I am.  And the last thing I needed, at this point in my life, was a bunch of dead birds lying around the bottom of their cages.

After a while the soaked paper started to loosed and did indeed start coming away in satisfyingly long chunks.  It was then that I realized that the layer of wallpaper I was working on was just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.  Underneath the layers of peach colored paint and paper that I had been scrapping away at was yet ANOTHER layer of the wallpaper/paint combo, this time a vintage print of maps, compasses, and sailing ships from the 1950’s or 60’s.  I kept working, and soon that paper too started peeling off.  It was then that I realized that the entire wall I was working on was covered in a thin layer of mold.  All across it, hiding under that paper for how many years a thin film of disgusting lung filling mold had been growing.  Ughhh.  After some disheartening internet research I realized I should probably be safe and try my best to kill that pesky mold all while not contaminating myself or the rest of the house with the virtually indestructible little mold spores.  Lacking the apparently necessary “disposable outwear” I suited up in the sexiest garbage bag that I had on hand, donned some plastic gloves, and put on a dust mask.  After taking the requisite selfies I once again headed back to work and sprayed the entire room in “pet-friendly” mold killer, doused the walls in bleach, and kept on spraying, scraping, peeling, and swearing.

Two long months later, after forcing myself day after seemingly endless day to go into that moldy, bleach filled, itty bitty piece of slimy wet wallpaper-filled room, I finally peeled the last of it off—hooray!

By now this room had become a sort of albatross, this Big Dark Thing that I needed to do, yet another project I started with zest and totally lost all love for midway through.  I quite literally closed the door on it for weeks so that I wouldn’t have to see the mess and the amount of work that was left; I had started to pile junk in there again, and  had to quite literally force myself off the couch and into that dank smelly pile of garbage.  I worried about it, fumed about it, and stopped writing because I had become convinced at a certain level that in order to write I just had to have this space, this special magical space devoted to writing and creativity.  I was certain that anything I wrote while not in that room would be somehow lesser than it could have been, even though I have never had a Writing Room before and it never seemed to stop me from writing.  This stupid writing room had become a THING, a thing that I used to procrastinate over, an excuse, a distraction, a complete giving in to the resistance that gets in the way of the creative spark.

But I did it!  One fateful day, after doing everything else that I possibly could do including doing the dishes (which I hate!), organizing my canning jars, and making homemade yogurt (I mean really, even I could tell I was procrastinating by that point), I forced myself into that gross garbage filled room and scraped off the very last bits of the paint paper paint paper paint paper.  The poor walls looked like they were going through a bad bout of meth addiction and the mold was still noticeable here and there, but, BUT!  It was almost there.  As I sat in the pile of soggy slimy wallpaper shreds and peeled away the last few pieces of paper I realized that as much work as this had been, as much as I had detested going up and down the ladder again and again and most likely triggering some kind of repetitive motion injury in my fingers from all the scraping, I did it.  Me.  I did it.  Yes I could have hired someone to go in there and do the job and the whole room would have been done long ago, but I DID IT.  I now know those walls down to the last little gouge and scrape and speck and stain of mold.  I put my heart into it and breathed in its very likely cancer causing particles, agonized over the mudding and sanding, replaced the trim when pieces of it came accidentally in my tired little hands, and even though I just did not have the energy to paint all those lovely Royal Pipland murals, it is still a beautiful room!  It is bright and fresh and I love spending time in there, mostly for writing, and for the odd nap.  And that strangely large armchair is actually very comfortable, as it turns out