It's a NeuroticThing

This week we are getting new carpeting in the family room, stairs, Mr. B’s room and my office. AH informed me that before I scheduled the installation date he had a check list of items that needed to be done prior to the carpet being installed. I told him he had until the day before the unknown install date to get it all done – and that the date would be sooner rather than later.

AH and I are not the fastest remodelers in the world. We’ve had our house 10 years and we are just now finishing the last “big” project. Of course the pace was mostly driven by funds but there have been a few projects that have just sat unfinished out of sheer lack of motivation. At this point I worry that if I don’t get the carpet installed now the stairs may sit bare for another two years.

AH’s list actually wasn’t so bad, he just needed the time to do it. This meant I needed to keep the kiddos out of his hair for a solid day (or the equivalent there of over several days time). He has made tremendous progress on his list in a very short time, especially after I told him last Monday that the carpet was coming in 10 days. Last night he tackled the last item on the list – a squeaky floor in Mr. B’s room.

Here’s where I need to explain how neurotic AH can be about certain things. I get lots of comments from people about the tidiness of my home (including garage). This is not me, this is AH. I am an average clean person. I am not especially tidy thought I do like to know that the surface underneath is clean. In our home I do the laundry, most of the cooking (including menu planning and grocery shopping), and other general household chores as I think is standard in most homes where the wife works in the home and the husband works away. AH takes my tidiness to a different level. Each night following dinner he cleans the kitchen – all of the kitchen. He 409’s the counters, washes and puts away the dishes, clears off clutter from the counters and vacuums the floor. This thoroughness is how AH treats everything in his life – he does not do projects half way. It is annoying for us less than perfect souls though I am thankful that AH never makes me feel guilty, I am capable of doing that on my own. When I get this way I yell at him for cleaning (can you imagine?). I know. . . I’m crazy (really I do know this but emotions aren’t always logical). On the flip side his need for clean does inspire me to work harder to be tidier and that is probably a good thing.

Now that you know a fraction of how neurotic AH is about his tasks you will understand how he approached the squeaky floor. After taking up the carpet he found a spot along the wall where the unevenness of the floor was causing the noise that drives him nuts. He put in a few shims to brace the floor more and the noise stopped – AH was very happy. He then realized that since everything is out of Mr. B’s room he would touch up the paint on the walls that had been patched a while ago but never painted over. He realized with the first stroke of paint in the closet that the color he was using didn’t match. I brought him a wet rag to wipe the paint off the wall. He then tried another color and called me back into the room to say that it too didn’t match and now he would have to remove the closet system to finish painting because he had already painted a quarter of the wall, too much to just wipe off.

“Why did you keep painting if you knew it was the wrong color?” I asked. “Nobody would have noticed that tiny patch at the back of the closet.”

“That’s not how I do things,” he answered.

“You’re crazy,” I responded supportively.

After finishing the painting he told me, “You’re not going to be happy with me in a minute.”

I stopped and looked at him. He had found another squeak in the floor and wanted to deal with it.

"I’m going to cut the floor open to find what's making that noise," he said.

“That’s fine,” I said back. “You’re not going to be happy with me either since I don’t like the color of Mr. B’s room and am going to want to repaint it soon.”

“You’re kidding, right?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

Guess what I’m neurotic about? If you guessed changing the wall colors you would be correct.