Mid-Month Musings - MARCH

 A Room Without A View

Many people decorate their own homes, and many of those people become experts at doing so.

I myself have become pretty adept at decorating, due to years of practice. Admittedly, I’ve only once tried my hand at wallpapering, and it was only one wall – but I did a fairly good job of it. I matched up the complex pattern on each strip of paper and cut out the fiddly shapes at the edges accurately. Unfortunately, the wall I chose was in our bathroom and there was no room for the pasting table so I had to squeeze it onto our very narrow landing. This meant I had to stand in the bathroom doorway to paste the strips of paper, stretching as far as I could [not far] in either direction to spread the paste. For anyone observing, it would have been a bit like watching a Dawn French comedy sketch. The result was that I didn’t put enough paste on some edges, so a few corners of the wallpaper quickly began curling off.

Before you ask, the paper was designed for bathrooms, and, despite having no window, our bathroom is well-ventilated as it has a good fan and we tend to bathe with the door wide open – when there is no window in your bathroom and you live with only your partner and the occasional cat, you get blasé about lounging in the bath, bits on full display [we became less blasé the year my niece and great-nephew lived with us!].

I’ve never tried tiling, but I did do a lot of stencilling in our flat in Greenwich, including making my own fish stencils for the bathroom which everyone who saw them seemed to be impressed by [though they might have just been being kind].

Fish On The Wall 

These are the bream and bass of my half-sleep,
the fish I painted on the bathroom wall
in our first flat, when we were fingerlings,
when I still loafed half-asleep in the soapsuds,
squinting through cave-mouth eyes
at my handiwork.
Moon-pale, or bright as dogwood leaves
swimming through an ice-cream breeze,
they edge close, then dart away
through the green-grey sea.

See the mackerel glide
from a corner’s universe,
stippled like tips of light through railings on an autumn day,
into the steam and soap,
into my half-dreams, the colour-mist,
pinks drifting into blues,
yellows into greens,
slipping out of one wall to slide into another.

 We left them over a decade ago.
That bathroom, by now, will be many times redecorated,
fish snared behind paint or tiles.
I wonder if they still slide, spry and cryptic,
behind someone else’s wallpaper,
passing through, like a sliver of moonlight,
on their journey home?

 Louise Wilford

Sadly, in recent years I’ve developed fibromyalgia and decided that I never want to paint or paper a wall ever again. I’ve employed a series of decorators over the last few years, but the most recent one, Steve [late forties, incompetent, unreliable and expensive] is the reason that, when I saw that the bathroom needed sprucing up, I decided to go back to doing it myself.

We need a new bath, sink and toilet, and the tiles are twenty-three years old, so a tad dated, but we can’t afford to replace everything. However, I argued, we could strip off the wallpaper, fill in the holes in the plasterwork, repaint the walls, and buy some cheap new bits and bobs to just make the room look a bit fresher and more interesting. Yes, there wasn’t really a way of getting rid of the crack in the bath panel where my great-nephew, aged three, kicked it in a tantrum, but maybe we could have a new towel rail that didn’t fall off the wall whenever we hung more than one bath towel on it, and maybe a new shelf that didn’t tip up randomly and spill the toothmugs into the sink. A friend of ours made us a lovely bathroom mirror when we moved into our flat in Greenwich in 1993, and this mirror was still hanging above the sink in our house in Yorkshire, slightly too high up the wall for me. Maybe, I thought, we could move the mirror elsewhere and buy a bathroom cabinet with mirrored doors instead? Perhaps we could get a new light fitting, and get rid of the wall-mounted toilet-roll holder? Maybe, instead of storing our clean towels in a large white plastic laundry basket behind the bath, so we have to rummage around taking out the upper layers of towels in order to find the one we want, we could have one of those fancy shelving units you see in lifestyle magazines or romcoms, the ones where you roll up your towels and display them to the world on the slatted shelves?

Little IKEA cabinet, bought thirty years ago, with our 'whale box' on the bottom shelf - this is a circular box decorated with stylised whales which originally contained some sort of gift from Boots but the box was the best thing about it - and the wedding present my sister bought us [a spherical bowl decorated with glittering fish]

I mean, how hard could it be? It’s only a small room. Surely it wouldn’t take long for two adults to paint a few walls and a ceiling, gloss the woodwork and put up a flat-pack cabinet and a towel rail?

That was two years ago...

Yes, for two years we have been living with a bathroom that looks like it’s survived the blitz, but only just. The movable items have been piled in the spare room and on the stairs leading to the attic bedroom. We’ve stored our everyday bathroom paraphernalia in two cardboard boxes beside the sink.

During all the decades we’ve been together, every time I've moaned at my husband for being untidy, he has always taken the line that after a few days you just stop noticing things you’ve left in inappropriate places. I've had major meltdowns about this in the past. But now I know what he means. You simply stop noticing that you have to step over a box of painting equipment on your way to the bathroom for your five-hundredth trip to the loo every night, and that getting into the spare bedroom to find something is like negotiating a military-grade obstacle course.

New mirrored cabinet with the remaining three coloured bottles from the original set of seven we bought when we lived in Greenwich, on top, and the jug and bowl I bought from The Pier when we first moved into our flat in Greenwich in 1993.

You are probably wondering why it has taken us so long. The answer is difficult to pinpoint. Bone-idleness would be the most accurate explanation, I suppose, but it has been a little more complex than that. It took me months to remove the wallpaper off the single wall I had wallpapered (the curling edges helped), and then there was a long hiatus while I built myself up to doing the painting. Then I needed P’s help with the painting because he’s a lot taller than me and can reach parts of the ceiling I can’t manage even on the stepladder. I kept getting very dizzy every time I stepped on the stepladder (it only has three steps!), and I was often in too much pain to either sit on the floor or stretch upwards, or even make the repetitive movements required by using a brush or roller, due to my fibromyalgia. My hands are sore due to eczema and the beginnings of arthritis. And we both work, though only part-time - but there are so many other things we have to do.

But, yes, let’s be honest, it was essentially bone-idleness.

Anyway, we have now, finally, got somewhere. The final impetus was my friend, B, asking me in an astonished voice: ‘Have you still not done that bloody bathroom?’. This brought it home how ridiculous the situation was. So, we have now painted the walls and ceiling. We've also put together a flat-pack cabinet without any major problems. We even managed to attach it to the wall without having to drill so many holes that it resembled one of those cartoon outlines created by bullet holes, where you can just push on the plasterboard and make a hole into next door’s back bedroom. 

Corner of bathroom showing some of the random bird decals I've stuck on walls.

We attached the mirrored doors, feeling very proud of ourselves, and then noticed that the doors didn’t meet at the front…

“Do you think you can move them a bit by turning these screws on the hinges?’ I asked, tentatively.

“No, don’t touch them – they’re nothing to do with it!’ said P, in a tone that forbad further argument.

That night, lying awake as usual at two o’clock, I considered this again. I looked up ‘How To Fix Gaps In Cabinet Doors’ on my phone, and immediately found five hundred videos showing how you could fix them in the time it takes to mutter 'P, you are an idiot!', simply by turning the screws in the hinges. 

So I got up and did this, and it worked.

The next morning, P rose before me, as he had to go to work. After leaving the bathroom, he popped his head back into the bedroom.

‘I don’t think the gap between the doors is as bad as we thought it was,’ he said.

‘Really?’ I muttered.

‘Or maybe they’ve settled, or something?’ He sounded less sure of himself this time. I just turned over and went back to sleep, figuring it would do him good to assume for a few hours that we’d been visited by the DIY fairies during the night.

Towel rail with new towels and bird decal

Since then, he has put up a towel rail and we have started returning everything to the bathroom.  Who would have thought that two adults could amass such a huge array of Stuff in one bathroom – a bathroom which only had one small cabinet before but now has an additional much larger one (the Stuff has expanded to fill both cupboards edge-to-edge). I mean, we have thrown away all the out-of-date creams and medicines, the multiple bottles of never-used hair products, the never-will-be-used toiletries-for-men bought for P by relatives as Christmas presents, the no-longer-relevant bath toys great-nephew used to love when he was three... So how can there still be such a lot of Stuff to find room for? It’s like we’ve been cursed in some way.

New towel shelves with another wedding present on top, this one a pretty turquoise glass bowl with silver birds swooping round it, given to us by our friend, T. This picture also shows another of the bird decals I put on walls in random spots.

But anyway I’ve had a good excuse to buy some new towels, and I can now brush my hair using a mirror that reflects my whole head and shoulders, rather than just the bit above my nose, without my having to clamber onto a step like a toddler. 

I've also been able to put some bird decals on the walls, which was the most pleasurable part of the whole endeavour.

So life's looking up!

Painting The Study 

Let me lay here for a while
          breathing in this childhood smell. Emulsion paint.
Dust sheets ruched in wormcasts at my toes.
A light-bulb moon above me hangs unlit. 

Spread thin, this blue’s quite dark,
moodier than the turquoise on the tin:
I’m floating in a sea, adrift
in waves of night-blue cloud-dust. 

The slats of the blinds slice the evening light.
Beyond, cars surge and ebb,
the daily wax and wane of other lives.

           But let me rest here, crowd-surfing gentle

fingers of thought, remembering
all the other rooms: grubby magnolia transformed
to rose or tiger-lily, grass or hemp or barely peach.
The shoulder-aching effort, push and drag 

of brush or roller - paintpad once – twisting a room
from that to this. Capturing a dream
that slithers off, that won’t be caught -
replaced by other wraiths – fire-red or Chanel grey, 

sand or cloud or dusk or sunset pink or cyclamon.
Promises that won’t be pinned to the plaster.

            But this sleepy blue’s a lullaby. 
            So let me stay here while the humour lasts.

Louise Wilford

PS: Look what I've just seen outside our house - apparently, this peacock and his mate visit our street regularly though I've never seen them before and no one knows where they come from!