remodeling this life

This is a guest post from Paid Twice at I’ve Paid For This Twice Already, where she shares her family’s journey out of debt and toward financial freedom by living frugally and embracing snowflaking. She’s been kind enough to offer some material while I’m out of commission for a couple of days. If you haven’t been to her site yet, please pop on over and visit her and consider subscribing to her RSS feed.

For Christmas, I received a beautiful handmade quilt that my mother-in-law purchased at a craft fair that goes perfectly with our playroom. It is yellow, blue, and green, with rust accents (the walls of our playroom are cornsilk yellow) and the cute cartoonish animals blend right in with the atmosphere we are trying to foster in that room. I immediately turned to my spouse and exclaimed “This will be perfect in the playroom!” and he agreed.

He thought I meant on the floor in the reading nook as a blanket. I meant on the wall.

To most of you, putting a quilt on a wall is not a foreign or crazy concept. But to my spouse, it was the weirdest thing I could have ever suggested. When we got home, I showed him the place on the wall I was going to hang the quilt, and he looked at me like I was crazy. “A quilt on a wall? Are you sure?”. But I was sure, and assured him it would be great. He didn’t look so convinced.

So what else was I to do but wait until he wasn’t around to protest, and hang the quilt on the wall myself. I’m no genius at decorating or home improvement, as indicated by my track record, so this isn’t about how to hang a quilt on a wall. I didn’t do it in the proper method – I simply used four small nails and tacked it onto the wall by its corners. (Try and suppress your groans and sighs of disbelief here ). But hang it I did.

When my spouse got home, it took him a moment to notice the change (I had to rearrange several other wall-hangings to put the quilt where I wanted it in the room) but once he did, he agreed that hanging the quilt on the wall was a good idea, and didn’t look anywhere near as weird as he thought it would. In fact, it didn’t look weird at all, it looked good and like it belonged there.

So the moral to my story is, if you have a decorating desire that your spouse isn’t quite on board with but you know will look fabulous – just wait until he or she isn’t home. They’ll thank you for it later, and hey, they didn’t have to do any of the work, so how much complaining can they really do?