A number of years before I even met DH, I bought a house that, let's say, needed a little TLC. Over the years I worked my way through the rooms pulling down wall paper, painting, sewing, and replacing light fixtures. One room was left untouched, the living room. It was what I thought good enough until I could "do it right". It had pale yellow walls, except where paint had been pulled off by tape to expose the lovely institutional green beneath it. The hardwood floors were stained where the previous owner's cat had its accidents. And the furniture was mismatched hand-me-downs.
Fast forward a couple of years, DH and I celebrated our wedding in the fall and were preparing to host our first family Christmas. Of course, the living room had to be done before that. DH rented a sander and stripped the floors. I painstakingly applied three coats of polyurethane to them. DH then tediously removed the six plus coats of paint with a heat gun that covered the crown moulding. He painted. I sewed. We moved his matching furniture in. We hung new blinds. He rag rolled over the newly painted walls. We arranged the new end and coffee tables. It was perfect. Almost.
Just one thing stood in the way of perfection. We just had to get the matching sofa table to put under the gilded mirror. So we drove down to Amish country. Three days before Christmas. In a driving rain storm. At night. If you've ever been there, you'd know that it's full of narrow country roads with rolling hills and not a street light for miles and miles. And buggies. Lots of black buggies with dark horse and no tail lights. We found out just how well our brakes worked that night.
By the time we made it home we were shaking. We just looked at each other and one of us said,
Now we can say we've done dumber things.
It didn't take much time before we had that opportunity. About three days, in fact. Christmas Eve as we were finishing the last of that project we realized we had no tree. So off we went to the tree lot. It was closed. And so was the second. Back to the first one, which was at a Protestant church, we went, where the last of their trees laid in a pile. We knocked on the door. We rang the bell. No one was there. So we did what all good people do. We snatched a tree off the pile and drove home. We stole our first Christmas tree!
Well, we've done dumber things!
PS - We did send them money for the tree afterwards, anonymously.
