The Guest Room

Since Stephanie is coming to visit next week, we have been referring to the guest bedroom as "Stephanie's room"; however, our youngest daughter took exception to that, so we have made a conscious effort to refer to it as a "guest bedroom."  We want to try to keep the second bedroom available only for our immediate family members and perhaps an invited friend, but we do not want our home to become a free hotel for whomever decides to invite him or herself down. That may sound antisocial, and I guess in a way it is, but people would not think of trying to stay in our Green Bay home, so we want to keep the Florida home on the same status. Besides, when Rick really works hard and is overtired, I need another room to escape from the snoring so I can get some sleep too.

The "before" guest bedroom.

We are excited to have Stephanie come, and if nothing else, that has prompted us to do what we can to prepare the room for human habitation.  Rick was up by 6:14 this morning, so we got an early start.  After taking everything out of the room except the bed which we draped in plastic, I armed myself with a bucket of water laced with tri-sodium phosphate (TSP) and a bucket of rinse water.  A couple of minutes later, Rick walked into the room and could see exactly where I had scrubbed and where I had not. The last owner of the house smoked, and by the nicotine stains on the walls, I do not think she heeded the Fire Department's warnings about not smoking in bed.  Stains outlined where every picture had hung in the room, and the juncture of wall and ceiling housed a brown line of nicotine soot.  Also, at one time someone must have dropped or slopped a cup of coffee in the room because two walls were splattered with coffee drippings. How in the world did we ever sleep in that room temporarily last year?  I guess we were just too exhausted at night to notice or to care.

I finished washing three walls before lunch time.  Meanwhile, Rick had removed the baseboard in the room, scraped the offending "paint line" above the old baseboard, and started to patch what needed patching.  We discovered that Gladys has 3.5" baseboards, and the new ones that we can buy are only 3.25".  Without lots of scraping and plastering, the new boards would obviously be a replacement. We also forgot to take out the base shoe in that room, so when we had the floors redone last year, the floor was not polished under the base shoe.  I may need to do some serious scrubbing along the walls in the room.

Although beautiful, the fan does not seem safe.

Another thing that needs our attention is the fan in the room. Rick took a bucket of water just to wash off the layer of dust on the fan blades.  We have a replacement fan that we need to install before Stephanie comes.  While I really like the looks of the old fan, it shimmies more than a stripper dancing to fast music in a cheap bar. Neither of us would want to sleep under the wobbly fan!

A sample of the blue that will adorn the guest room.

Rick was able to paint the ceiling today, and tomorrow we will try to give the room the first coat of wall paint.  We have chosen a blue to make the blueberries in the comforter cover "pop" when you look at it.  I really like the color and think it may be the most dynamic in the whole house.  We would like to add some wooden blinds to match the tan color in the comforter cover also.  Once again, all it takes is time and money.

Gladys' latest surprise.

After a delicious dinner this evening, I went into the master bath to wash my hands.  When I turned off the faucet, I heard a steady stream of water.  Oh-oh.  I called Chief Running Water who looked at the trap under the sink and sort of laughed.  There is a hole that finally has worn through the old pipe.  Please keep in mind that this is the house that had SCOTCH TAPE on all of the drains when we bought the house. Thankfully, we keep a plastic garbage can under the sink, so the dripping water was safely contained in the plastic bag in the garbage can.  Although we could have made another run to Lowe's, we decided that we had other functioning sinks in the house, and this latest disaster can wait until tomorrow.

I look forward to seeing how the guest room will turn out once it is painted.  Obviously, we now face a plumbing job tomorrow as well.  We have worked from sun-up to sun-down, and beyond, every day that we have been here.  We still have a thousand things to do, but that is part of the challenge.

Gladys sometimes gives us gifts and sometimes gives us these little surprises just to see if we are really paying attention to her. We are here for eight more weeks, and something tells me that Gladys will get more than her fair share of attention.