Rewards and Punishment in the Bedroom

I've gotten into kind of a bad habit of blurting out inappropriate phrases when Mr. W tells me he's making progress on one of my top priority house/renovation projects.

Like when he said he was going to install the shower backer-board that had been leaning against the wall of our master bedroom for weeks, I think I yelled "Take off your pants!" Or when he said he was going to clean up all the scrap wood from the backyard, I turned to the cat and said, "Your daddy's gonna get lucky tonight!"

On the flipside, however, when he flubs it on something that matters to me, I punish him royally. Like when I casually mentioned 8,000 times that I thought the bedroom would look so much more finished if we could get the window moldings up. He bought the molding; I primed and painted it; and as he was hanging it around the doorway inside the closet he informed me he didn't have enough to go around the windows. He would have to go buy more. Later.

Completely calmly, I said, "Why in all that's great and holy would you install molding INSIDE the closet before you put it on the windows that I have to look at every day? No one looks at the inside of the closet!" Then my head exploded and I had to take an Advil. Punishment exacted. A few minutes later, without an ounce of murder in his voice, he advised, "Maybe if you'd get off your $%*#@*$ a$$ and help me once in awhile, this stuff wouldn't happen!"

And now we get to add the molding fight to our long list of benign, but extremely heated lovers' quarrels. 

It's funny what makes you feel delighted and/or enraged you when you're working on a house...

Now here's a little reveal of one of the happier projects we knocked out in the bedroom: the gallery wall.

Worry not, dear reader, I will be DIYing a bench to balance the big empty space at the bottom there.

Mr. W likes to do things very scientifically, so he busted out his 2-way laser level to get everything lined up just right on the wall.

That's not a big, red bald spot on his head, by the way. The laser is hitting him back there. And yes, his brain is level.

If you're wondering where we got the awesome grapevine, Mr. W found it outside the local recycling center in Solvang and brought it home. Unfortunately it had some sort of burrowing creature living inside of it that withstood a bug bomb inside a trashbag and had to be doused in Raid twice before dying. I'm sure we'll probably wake up with antlers or tails or something one morning because that thing is off-gassing insecticide in our room now...

The final product made me immensely happy, though. It was exactly what I had envisioned—a cool symbol of wine country surrounded by Mr. W's awesome photography. The pictures showcase some of our favorite places we've visited together—Santa Ynez Valley, Monterey, Capri, and Provence. 

And you didn't hear it from me, but Mr. W may have been rewarded handsomely for his efforts on this one...