Knotty Pine Project

Starting today or tomorrow I will begin paneling our guest room with some knotty pine boards that I bought years ago, back when we lived in our previous house. At the time, Cheryl was lusting for a new house, or rather for an new old house. She would scour the neighborhoods in search of the just the right thing: old, charming and Spanish. I suppose I should be thankful she was only looking for a house.

She found about 6 or 7 likely houses and took me, driving by at about 2 miles per hour, to them all, more than once, even though none of these houses were actually for sale (a fact that seemed not to matter). At each one Cheryl left her card in the mailbox, and on the card she explained to the homeowner that we intended to occupy the house some day soon, just so they could get used to the idea.

For weeks she drove by the houses after work, stalking and terrorizing the owners until I'm sure they were afraid to walk outside. In the meantime, while open to the idea of moving, I was a bit sceptical about trying to buy houses that weren't actually for sale. After some time and unsuccessful house stalking, Cheryl lost hope, too. We agreed that we should fix up our previous house--give it some charm and accept it as our home. So we bought the knotty pine boards and I proceeded to panel the living room.

About halfway through the paneling project, one of the terror-stricken home owners caved in and called us, offering to sell if we would just leave them alone. Luckily, it was the one house of Cheryl's harem that I really liked. During this process our real-estate person convinced me to take down the panelling (rather than finishing the job in our previous house) since most people would not like it. The principles of democracy become crystal clear when selling a house.

So now its time to pull the paneling out of the garage and put it to use in the guest room. This time everything seems right, with no regrets about a house that got away.

Willow, in the meantime, has been attending management seminars in Orlando, and she decided to kick off this new project with a bit a fun to demonstrate her humanity and good nature before taking charge of the project and subjecting me to who-knows-what new techniques of mind control and management domination. More to come.