Ten days ago I decided, “Today’s the day.”  I have a room in my house that serves as my office right now, and the last time it was used as a bedroom, I had hurriedly put up some wallpaper on one of the walls that was damaged, with no time to fix it, so I covered it well. My daughter-in-law has been living with me and in the daily process of talking to her about how they are working to make their “new” house livable, I have been gathering the steam needed to do some work on mine.  So, she and I tore off the wallpaper in my office. There were several layers, right down to the wall board, which is problematic in my home. When the interior was originally painted, a strange type of acrylic paint was used that has a tendency to peel off, exposing the layers used to create the drywall, and the inside of the wallboard has the same qualities as cardboard. Think about trying to put anything with moisture on cardboard–dry wall mud, wallpaper, paint, etc—it becomes a ripply mess!

Naturally I saw and felt some parallels between the physical  and emotional process of removing layers. The top paper, a light tan, patchwork but marbled type, was applied during the time I had older children moving in and out of the house, looking for their spot on the planet, making decisions about their lives, going to school, or even having a baby and needing a spot to land. The torn strips, wet down and smoothed on to the wall covered a lot of rough places and blemishes; chaos creating order.   The next layer of paper was navy blue with a large floral print. This went up before a succession of teen-age boys moved into the room. It adequately hid the ripples in the wall and also the dirt, plus the previous paper did not show through. It made the room seem less child-like, more mysterious and the inevitable smoky incense provided by the occupant settled as a cloud mid-room, temporarily comfortable within the imperfect walls.

The first layer of paper I had put in the room when my children were young was a juvenile white with very skinny plaid lines of red, yellow and blue, the primary colors. This was the paper that held promise, easy to accessorize, easy to clean, and cheerfully bright.  When it was time to remove it and change to something else, I discovered the awful truth–I had no idea what could happen to the walls. The paint began to peel off with the paper, leaving huge patches of something like layers of brown paper bag, only thinner. I stopped taking off the paper, and after many experiments,  including painting the brown areas, I found it was best to paper over the whole mess.

This was coming down as we stripped, parts of it coming in big chunks, some of it coming in pieces less than an inch in size. It took time. When it was off, I breathed a sigh of resolution, grateful that I had help, and that the process was behind me. I began the repair work. Dry wall mud, smoothed and sanded, holes patched, enough coats of mud to adequately sand the ripples “out” and then a light coat of mud to slightly texture the wall. It took days for it to dry and successfully cure to my satisfaction. Next was paint, a placid green, slightly tinged with blue, the color of some of the desert plants I had grown up with and come to love, peaceful and speaking of home. A second coat convinced me it was the right color. Then the thought-out, well planned yet bold experiment. I stenciled a mandala on a portion of the wall to make the place interesting and beautiful.

So goes my life.