Last fall, we finally got our electric system updated and brought up to code (or almost). We still need GFI outlets in the kitchen and bathroom. As was not uncommon, I was not at my best when the electricians were showing up and had retreated to the bedroom where I could be a grump on my own. This was a very big mistake.
I have a very intelligent husband. He has good esthetic sense. He was a commercial artist student at one point in his life. He has done tons of home remodels and renovations, even though we’re now restricted by disabilities insofar as what we can accomplish on our own. Even though our local code would let us do our own electrical update, we had decided that we would be better off with an electrician after we dealt with the local power company and their run around. (We were right too. It went very smoothly with a pro on the job, whereas we couldn’t even get a call back when it was us doing the work.) I trusted my husband to make the best choices about the power update, and some of the stuff from the electrician was not big news—I already had figured out that we were going to have to have a different location for the main box, since it had been put in a closet with a natural gas water heater originally. That was not rocket science, nor was the electrician stating that our dining room was the best location for the power to come in.
On the side of the house where the new exterior box would be placed there was one window leading into the dining room, rather off center too. For some reason, it seemed logical to me to put it on the narrower strip of wall beside the window, then run the power up into the attic and down into the crawl space. Of course, I also realized that we’d have an electric box in the room on the wall too, as that seemed like standard practice.
What I did not anticipate was exactly what I got.
I had been expecting a power box that was “normal” size for a small house. I had been expecting it to be placed on the exterior wall, literally on the other side of the meter and main box located outside. I had expected new conduit to be used to bring in the power, as well as going out through the ceiling and floor.
So what did I get?
I got an industrial size power box. Seriously, you could run a dozen houses off of this panel! It’s nearly three feet tall and about eighteen inches wide, with three inch conduit leading in and out. Even better, that conduit looked like it had been rolling around in a truck for a few years. It was scuffed, dirty, and gouged. I now had this giant power box sticking about eight inches out from the wall in industrial gray.
It wasn’t just ugly and unattractive, it was FUGLY!
I saw it. I ranted. I cried.
I had one continuous wall, and now, smack dab in the middle of it, I had the world’s ugliest electrical mess I had ever seen. There was absolutely no way to hide it. It was just Too. Damn. Big.
I had a world class hissy fit.
It was so bad that my husband, who is extremely frugal, was willing to pay the electrician to come back and move it. I had just paid a LOT of money to have this monstrosity put in. There was no way I was going to pay that same man to come back and do something that should have been done the first time.
For two weeks, I ranted, I fumed, and I cried.
Resignation hit. I was stuck with it, even if it was the ugliest thing I could possibly imagine, let alone having paid to have installed in the room.
My mother taught me a lot of things over the course of my life so far, and I imagine she’ll teach me a few more things still. One of the things that I learned at her knee was to face the things we can’t change and have to accept head on. In terms of our physical environment, if you can’t hide it or change it, then you claim it for your own.
I spent another full week thinking about how to cope with it. I had threatened to paint it bright purple, and the walls in lurid pink. While that would have been okay, it wasn’t exactly up my husband’s alley. At the same time, he was more than a little desperate to make me happy about the situation and was willing to be a little more tolerant than usual about my decisions about the Cure. While thinking about it, I surfed the ‘net, looking for inspiration, but it wasn’t until we were at Walmart, of all places, when inspiration actually hit.
I would paint it with a paint designed to resemble brushed nickel. The walls would be painted your basic white, mostly because I had not come up with a color scheme and I was more than ready to make the ugly nicotine stained 1940’s green disappear in the dining room. The ceiling is going to have corrugated white roofing panels put up to hide the hole that was cut for accessing the attic and is now covered with a piece of scrap ceiling tile screwed over it. That saved us from repairing the hole and sanding off the horrible swirled pattern in the drywall ceiling, as well as continued the whole industrial-meets-steam-punk look that has been chosen for what is to be MY room, ugly electric box and all.
It’s just my husband and I living here. We don’t do holiday events at our house usually, as our daughter lives about an hour away. We usually do it at their house, partly because she has a lot of very serious health problems, and we go down to help her too. That means a dining room isn’t really necessary at our house. Heck, the only people we know in town is the electrician we hired and a few of our neighbors, hardly the kind that are going to expect to be invited for a formal dinner. At the same time, we also don’t want to go too crazy, since a future sale of the house is not impossible. That means with everything we do, there has to be a kind of balance—we don’t want to invest more into the house than we will ever be able to recover.
So, it’s not so much a dining room as a room for sitting, reading, doing crafts, and sewing. It’s my room, as in when we were teenagers, only I don’t have to keep my clothes and have a bed in there too. It will have a table, but it isn’t for dining. It will be for craft, art and sewing projects. The chairs will be for comfort and practicality while sewing, painting, or crafting. It’s going to have a giant beanbag type “love seat” for hanging out with my Kindle or just watching a movie on my own. (Husband and I have radically different tastes in movies. He can tolerate mine, but I am afraid that his are more than I can handle with gore and violence.) When our granddaughter is visiting, that giant beanbag will soon replace her cot as a place to sleep for her stay.
In the center of the room, hanging from the ceiling, will be a petite crystal chandelier, sort of a counter point to the industrial type pipe. The two windows will have curtains hanging from pvc pipe that has been painted to look like the conduit and electric panel box, using giant shower curtain rolling gizmos, with grommets in the curtains for the shower curtain rings to go through. There will also be pleated white paper shades on the windows, a nod to the fact that we do live in town, on a corner no less.
The ugly and ancient carpeting in the room, covering the hardwood floors, will be removed when we’ve finished the messy stuff. Hopefully, we won’t get any surprises when that is ripped up, like badly done patches or nail strips that have mangled it entirely. I’m hoping that it is something we can live with, as I do not want carpeting in any room that I am sewing in. (If you’ve ever lost a pin or needle into a carpet, only to find it with your bare foot, you know why!)
Of course, once I get the room done, it isn’t ever truly DONE, as in never to be changed again. That’s the best part of owning your own home, you can change the look any time you want, as long as you have the funds for supplies and the energy to do it! Part of me is mulling the idea of the faux ancient plaster look, but I really want to get the room done, as in ready-to-use.
