Reason five: Random Acts of Decorating

I almost always fall asleep before HH. Usually, this is not a problem, but there are some mornings that I awake internally screaming, why oh why?



This first happened when the side mirror on my car was damaged and hanging partially off (no, this did not have anything to do with me hitting the garage...). HH proudly announced that he would fix it. Well, he did. By screwing it onto the car. Genius...



More disturbing than fixing a car in the most ghetto way possible, are the "decorating ideas" that HH gets in those evenings while I sleep unknowingly on the couch.



I decided to get this wall mirror after I realized that I am very, very bad at plucking my eyebrows in the medicine cabinet mirror. HH gladly hung it on the wall for me, BUT put it at his eye level (a good five inches higher than mine.) It does swivel, but HH needs to check his bald spot every two hours so evidently, that was more important. A few weeks later during my slumber, I awoke to the sounds of banging. I immediately ran to the source; HH was hanging up his brush and dollar store hand mirror (also used to check the bald spot.) There are two reasons that made me most angry about this...well, maybe three. First, I have never seen HH use this brush, he is mostly a comb user. Second, with the new swivel, movable mirror, hand mirror is really no longer necessary. And, last, this is the guest bathroom, they don't want to see your crap hanging on the wall AND the room is painted pretty bright ORANGE; we really don't need more craziness going on. Oh, and a fourth reason, notice the patched holes that needed to be made to hang just two items - very classy.



Besides the bathroom "decorating", HH has tried to slip several other items onto walls while I slept. There was the STL Cardinals miniature base that was taped to a hallway wall with electrical tape. Recently, a sheet of USPS Commemorative Star Wars stamps was added to an extra bedroom wall with scotch tape' only one usable stamp remains so I hope that this will soon be removed. An ongoing fight was a metal sign of an old advertisement for guns and ammo that I recently won and it holds a rightful place on the garage wall.

As if these guerrilla decorating efforts aren't bad enough, I often have to spend time arguing about ridiculous ideas. In an effort to not bore you, I will share only my favorite: We had a minor mishap when we bought a new television. It was too big for the cabinet, so we had to dismantle it and the poor tv simply sits on the bottom. HH believes that this is too low to the ground (it is about a foot or so). So, for Christmas he asked for bed risers. My mother indulged not knowing that his plan was to bring a nasty, greasy car jack into the house, jack the tv up (it is terribly heavy), put the bed risers under each of the legs and create a new "entertainment center." This argument got all the way to the attempt. Thankfully, the jack could not get the tv high enough - crisis averted.

I am not so naive to attempt that my gay husband and I might not have blow outs over decorating. But I am fairly confident that I would not wake up to sports memorabilia taped to a wall. I am pretty sure that the goal for the bathroom would be a spa like interior rather than a wall of grooming items. I doubt that I would have a two year argument over a sign for guns (unless, perhaps, we were talking about arms as guns).

No amount of watching HGTV will ever make HH a "good decorator". No amount of complaining seems to stop the late night tape sessions. I have learned that I must do a walk through in the morning to see if anything has been added to his gallery of oddities.

The frustrating part is that I think that people still see a hetero home's decor as a reflection of the woman living there no matter what. People assume it is the woman's taste, the woman's effort. Yet my efforts are overshadowed by HH's weird decorating power struggle. If I had a gay husband, at the least this burden would be shared. I wouldn't spend hours arguing over junk furniture and maybe, just maybe, I would be able to fall asleep and not worry.