Time for a Change: Pink Paws Anyone?

It’s been over fifteen years since we redecorated. OK. Closer to twenty. The love seats in the living room are fraying and starting to remind me of an old person’s house.  Where they have such old, out-of-date styles and worn furniture that you know they never invite company and don’t really look at their surroundings any more. Or maybe they just can’t see and don’t really care. 

So we began the big redecorating event. Before I even get to the pink paint paw prints all over, let’s just say it has been an adventure.

First getting fabric samples for the love seats. Endlessly.  

Phase1: I had this idea of Hawaiian prints. We lugged home and looked through fabric samples of tropically-themed prints. Seemed like a good idea. In this digital age it also seemed someone should be able to show us photos of what our love seats would like covered in splashy tropical prints. I sure didn’t want to repeat my late ‘70’s decorating fiasco of orange mushroom wallpaper all around the kitchen.  

I found a design store that employed a youngster who said she could send me photos of what our love seats would look like. Only problem was it took her about two weeks to respond to my emails. And then my emails to her started to be “postmaster returned.” I guess she did not survive employment in the brutal world of decorating design. And her employer was not any more adept than she had been. We were not ready to start all over again with another clueless youngster. 

Phase 2. I looked online at photos of couches in tropical prints. Thank goodness. What a disastrous decorating idea that would have been. Big splashy floral prints all over two matched love seats, totally covered in fabric. I quickly filed that idea with the rejects.  

Phase 3. More fabric books, this time in neutrals. Directly from an upholstery re-covering store. Or maybe it’s us who are recovering, as they say about other types of mental and physical problems. Nevertheless, we decided we would do our own design work and save money. And we didn’t need to wait two weeks for comments from someone who was likely to be fired next week. Three trips back and forth with fabric samples and we settled on a fabric. The couches were picked up.  

The living room now was nearly empty and it was time to get on with the painting. Also time to pick paint colors.  I bought a few accent pillows and silk flowers to help select a wall color. Time for everything else in the living room to be packed away. Soon the painting would begin.  

You may think now is time you will learn clever tricks on how to decorate with painted paw prints? But no. You have to wait for the mauve paint for that part of the story. We picked a neutral wall shade for the living room. The painting stage had begun. 

But it is time to tell you more about the dog, an aging sheltie.  Like any sensible senior citizen who likes his house undisturbed, he was not happy with the redecorating. And that’s not surprising. His hearing is shot. Or else his dementia has reached the stage he no longer responds to verbal cues. His eyesight too is pretty much gone. And his hips are weak. But his one good sense, smell, is still working. And he could smell trouble. So he responded with his only real remaining communication method to show his displeasure. He christened the living room carpet. Oh well, the carpet needed a good cleaning too. 

Final phase. Do something with the dining room. Two decades ago when we bought our house, the living room and dining room were decorated with the help of a designer with a vision. Vast sweeps of mauve in different tonal depths, strips of floral wallpaper to highlight, and swaths of busy floral fabrics in mauve with blue undertones were the essence of that designer’s vision. And in his defense I should say mauve was sort of in style. And we had no clue what we wanted.  

Now I knew I wanted anything but mauve. But here we were in the dining room that had sort of matched the living room.  With the busy, florally-mauve window toppings and wallpaper trim, mauve walls that were old, faded and especially dirty from several dogs over the years taking the dining room as their favorite sleeping spot. The latest dog being the elderly sheltie who refused to sleep anywhere but on the hardwood floor of that room, with his back against the deep mauve wall. At least he is mostly blind and can’t be blamed for choosing this as his bedroom. 

After months of agonizing over redecorating the living room, we had forgotten about the need to make some selections for the dining room.  The painter had practically been living with us for the last month. He could strip the wallpaper and spend another few weeks painting coat upon coat of new paint over the old, dark mauve to lighten up the room. But then we’d also need to do something different with the windows. And I haven’t even mentioned how long it took to select and order window toppings for the living room. We decided in ten minutes to just re-paint the dining room mauve. After all, how often did we entertain? And the dog would only be kept out of his favorite room one day and night. Or so we thought. 

I was making some banana bread in the kitchen when the cry went up. “Quick. Catch the dog!”  The painter had not yet started painting. So no barriers were up. He had just placed the paint tray with the light mauve on the floor. The dog could not stand without assistance. Or so we thought. What were the chances the aging dog would get in the paint?  Well, the odds are really irrelevant when it happens.  

Luckily, three aging adults (the painter, my husband, and I) were faster than one aging sheltie. We caught him before he hit the carpet.  

At first we thought some wet paper towels would clean the paint off his paws. After we tried wet paper towels and released the dog, he was still leaving pink paw prints everywhere. Have you ever noticed how close light mauve is to pink? Well, it is on hardwood floors.  My long-suffering husband scooped the dog up and deposited him in the yard. After thoroughly hosing and wiping the dog’s paws, and seeing the water finally run clean we let the dog dry outside.  The painter mopped up the tracks.

Thereafter, a baby gate closed off one door to the dining room. And a large buffet chest on wheels blocked the other entrance. The dog paced. 

As promised, however, the painting was quickly completed. And our sheltie finally settled down. That night when we went to look for the dog to help him get up and go out for his nightly yard visit, to our surprise, he again somehow had defied our expectations. He had maneuvered his way into what we now call “the mauve room” and was lying in his favorite spot up against the wall. But it was no problem. As the painter had promised, this was quick-drying paint.

We all are glad we had gone with one coat, even if it is mauve. I think our re-decorating is finished for 2012. Probably we also are finished with redecorating for the rest of this decade and the next. By then, if we are still around, we will be in our 80’s and no longer care. And, who knows, maybe mauve will be back in style.