If You Give a Pal a Paint Class…

I took another painting class recently and this was the result:

I thought it would look nice next to the collection of crosses I received from my dad. He’s a retired minister who collected crosses from antique stores for a few years. His wife had some of them in a framed display (not quite a shadow box) which looked quite lovely. A few years ago, after Dad entered an assisted living facility, he divided his collection up among all four of his kids and his wife mailed them to each of us for Christmas. I’ve been meaning to do a display of the crosses I was given but just hadn’t gotten around to it.

Now, however, I have an additional reason to get moving on displaying them all — we were offered a free used piano. The Scout’s piano teacher thought we would be a good home for it (she knew the person giving the piano away); I convinced my dh that this was a fine idea but none of us knew where we would put such a large musical instrument, so last month she came over and found the right place in our house. Then she gave us the man’s name and phone number, and a few days later was moving day.

The Scout didn’t wait to move the piano into the house before playing it.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way — and sometimes that means using a homemade skateboard as a furniture dolly. 

 

 

 

Adding a new piece of furniture meant rearranging sofas, chairs, lamps, tables, and pictures — which, honestly, is still happening because we can’t move anything just one time.  I got first shot at telling young men where specifically to place certain items. Then the next day SuperDad put them to work rearranging my arrangement of the furniture. Within 24 hours, I was moving the coffee table and recliner myself — not the smartest activity in which to indulge but when you can’t sleep at one o’clock in the morning, what else do you do?  That was how it all went for the first 4 days, before we moved on the placement of lamps and pictures. I’d go to work and come home to an arrangement that needs tweaking by me (but only when SuperDad was not there to see what I’d done to his plan). It’s now been a month since the arrival of a piano disrupted the living room furniture arrangement, and I fear that inertia has exerted its powerful force on the hanging of pictures.  I don’t really like where some any of them are placed but no one has the energy to move them (the flu hit 2 out of 4 of us… so far) and rearranging would probably mean more holes in the walls. And then we’d have to patch and paint walls! Of course, if we’d been really smart, we would have painted the walls before settling the sofas and chairs and piano into their new places, but simply agreeing where to put each of those rearranged furnishings was difficult enough. Plus it has been well documented that married couples have difficulty choosing paint colors.

 

The piano and piano bench are the only items of furniture which have not been moved at least twice since this photograph was taken. 

At any rate, we have a new-to-us piano (the water damage might get partially covered by a table runner when I get back to sewing), a rearranged living room, and there will soon be a cross collection on display — if we can agree on where to put it.