Why Did I Pull That Thread?

Did you ever read your kid the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie? It’s a circular story that starts off with a hungry mouse showing up and you give him a cookie, which makes him want a glass of milk and after he takes a drink of milk he looks in the mirror to see if he has a milk moustache and that makes him realize he needs a hair cut… I know it is a children’s book, but I am absolutely sure the inspiration for the book was the very grown up thing of redoing, repainting, recovering, reanything one thing in your house.

Six months ago I redid the drainage and apron of the driveway. It was such an improvement on the problem of our gravel at the street end of our driveway washing away and it made both Russ and I very happy. Especially Russ, since all he had to do was earn the money to pay for it.

That improvement made him say to me, “Don’t you think we should redo the floors this summer?” So I did. Well, like the mouse looking in the mirror for a milk mustache and only then seeing he needs a haircut, redoing the floors made the rest of the house look shabby.

So I called my friend Lane about recovering the twenty-year-old furniture in our playroom. Since the TV in that room is twenty years old we don’t watch it so if we are going to make the furniture nice we might as well replace the TV. That means I have to call the electrician. While he is here he can replace the yellowed baffles of the can lights. He will have to touch the ceiling to replace those, which means the ceiling will have to be painted. If the ceiling is being painted that walls should too, because nothing will make them look worse than a fresh white ceiling.

Before I could do anything in the playroom I had to know which TV we were getting so the electrician can know where to move the wires. And so on…

Now I have a replacement TV waiting for this all to happen, but I need to find someone who wants my old TV, is strong enough to lift it and has a car big enough to take it. I am not sure there is anyone on earth who wants a 40-inch square TV, but I just want to give it away.

I am wondering where pulling that redoing thread is going to end. I think that if I stop wearing my reading glasses in the house I might not notice what looks shabbier next to what has been improved. That is only after I replace the breakfast room chandelier and do something about the living room drapes.