Wednesday's Words for September 1, 2010

The Ashburys have redecorated their living room. Sort of.

I believe it was about four years ago when my beloved declared, “to hell with the cost of it” and purchased me that lovely living room suite from the back of a farmer’s hay wagon, for the grand total of fifteen dollars. Yes, I know it’s only been four years, but that set endured a lot of wear and tear in that time, let me tell you. Our upstairs remains set up as a large additional bedroom, with two beds for my grandchildren who will be spending at least one night every week here for the foreseeable future. So our plan to have a library up there has been put on hold.

What couldn’t be put on hold was accommodating the growing number of books crammed onto every flat surface available.

Just as we were contemplating this state of book overload, in came the weekly sale fliers, and, low and behold, Canadian Tire was having a sale on bookcases, at a ridiculously low price. (Though called Canadian Tire, this Canadian retail behemoth sells much more than car-related products). These bookcases are six feet tall, two feet wide, with five adjustable shelves, and the possibility of at least one more shelf each.

My beloved bought four of them.

He assured me all four would fit in our living room, if we took out the love seat.

Well now, I must confess that given the choice between a place to put more books, and a place to put more guests, I will choose the former over the latter. Thus, the love seat was consigned to the basement, to make way for the new bookcases.

Only three fit in the living room, but we did have room in my office for one and that all turned out happily enough.

However, the nice shiny new book cases really showed me how very worn the carpet in that room had become. An inexpensive area rug, it had been shampooed a couple of times, but displayed pulls where animal claws and children with sharp-edged toys had abused it.

So we went shopping for a new area rug. We wanted a smaller one, so it would not be under any furniture except the coffee table. I saw many that I thought would have been just lovely in that room. My beloved, however, rejected all of them until we found one in a corner of a store, this rug being—you guessed it—marked down to a ridiculously low price.

The rug looks very nice and does match the general color scheme (if I may be so bold as to claim to have a color scheme) in the living room. The only problem was the rug we previously had covered the fact that beneath it was nothing but bare wood, as that area rug and its predecessor had replaced broadloom. That bare wood now lay exposed for all to see.

We needed new flooring for the part of the floor the rug and the furniture didn’t cover. It’s my fault what happened next, because those were my very, unthinking words to Mr. Ashbury.

He declared that we would simply buy enough tiles to cover the bare wood that showed. My beloved further instructed me to look at the liquidation warehouse to see if I could find some ridiculously low-priced tiles. Instead, I drove us to the newer home building store. There, we found some wood-grained tiles that have the appearance of hardwood flooring. We bought them and they weren’t even on sale.

While I was in Toronto for the day this past Saturday, my beloved installed them.

Now the living room does look very nice, although I need to go shopping—alone—for a new sofa. Our second daughter was especially surprised to see how good the room looked. Of course, she couldn’t resist the urge to lift a corner of the carpet to check if Mr. Ashbury really had only tiled around everything as he’d told her he was going to do. She shook her head in resigned acceptance to see that indeed, he had.

I could have saved her the trouble of wondering. My beloved is a good man, but if he were to have a motto, I know it would be, “Red Green forever!”

Love,
Morgan
www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury