Last week, as you may recall, I embarked on a home improvement project. I decided it was time to re-do my guest room and bath.  By my estimate, I’m about half way through.

The thing is, home improvement projects always take a little more time and money than you delude yourself into believing going into it.  I’ve done fairly well on the money budget because I can turn a sow’s ear into a Dupioni silk pillow. I can flat out design on a dime.  But the time budget? Not so much.

So far I have removed the wallpaper from the bathroom and I have painted the guest bedroom walls and ceilings.  I still have to texture the bathroom walls, then prime the bathroom walls, then paint the bathroom walls and then probably glaze the bathroom walls at which point I will wonder what in the heck was wrong with the wallpaper in the first place and then I will  possibly punch myself in the face.

Here’s the breakdown of how much time I’ve spent on this project so far:

Moving furniture out of guest room:  1 hour

Dislodging mattress from stair case:  45 minutes

Removing switch plates: 30 minutes

Wandering around trying to remember where I set down the screw driver: 1 hour

Combing the carpet for the teeny tiny switch plate screws that I dropped:  1 hour

Removing wallpaper:  6 hours

Wandering around trying to remember where I set down the scraper:  2 hours

Painting:  6 hours

Wandering around trying to remember where I set down the paint brush/paint can opener/stir stick/drop cloth:  2 hours

Wiping paint off the bottom of my foot:  45 minutes

Wandering around looking for my glasses which were on my head: 2 hours

Wandering around trying to remember where I set down my iced tea:  2 hours

Wandering around looking for the cordless phone:  45 minutes

Have you ever noticed they never show Bob Villa wandering aimlessly around the set wondering where he set down his screwdriver? Of course they don’t, it’s a one hour show.

So yes, since the economy has totally tanked, I thought it would be a good time to re-do my guest room.  We may be taking in boarders or relatives. You never know.

Actually, I’ve been wanting to re-do my guest room for – let’s see, we’ve lived in this house for eight years – so that would be eight years that I’ve been wanting to re-do my guest room.  The good thing about procrastination is that by default you bypass a lot of really bad home decor trends, trends like the Northwoods plaid and cabbage roses, that somehow made sense at the time. 

So for whatever reason, this was the week that God laid it on my heart I decided to re-do the guest room and so I set off this morning to find bedding, which is where I always start with design, the fabric. I should say here that I’ve been looking for bedding for — let’s see — eight years, and nothing has really grabbed me. So I decided that if nothing is really going to grab me, I might as well not be grabbed by something that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. 

As luck would have it, I found myself in Dillards today and their bedding had just been marked down to 75% off.  It was 40% off yesterday, but today 75%.  Now I’m not one to ascribe the will of God to bedding because who am I? I don’t know anything.  But clearly God wanted me to have some new guest bedding or He wouldn’t have marked it down.  So, I got the quilt, skirt, two shams, sheets and a decorative pillow for about $70.  Yay me.

After I picked Sean up from school, I told him we were going to do something really fun and then I introduced him to the joy of stripping wallpaper.  At one point when we were up to our knees in postage stamp sized bits of gooey red wallpaper, he turned and pointed the scraper at me and said, “This is the funnest day EVER!” And he really meant it.

Is it considered child labor if they like it?

I promise to show y’all before and after pictures just as soon as I have some after to show you, something more than little red pieces of wallpaper.

Know what we’re doing over at Inspired Spaces? We are writing letters to our architects telling them what we would do over in our homes if we had the chance.  Come. Share, won’t you??? Make me feel better about the dumb stuff in my house by telling me about the dumb stuff in yours because dumb design loves company.

And…. soon, I’m not sure exactly when but I have a deelightful guest blogger lined up who is going to talk about decorative finishes and how to turn a hunk of junk into an heirloom.  There WILL be pictures and y’all will NOT be disappointed, I promise.

You might want to put Inspired Spaces in your bloglines so you don’t miss out on the all design goodness coming your way.  Purdy please?