House Projects

In these texts, Amy describes how she and her husband were able to get wallpaper map of the world in their house and maintain their marriage.

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English Transcript

My husband and I went to Peru this past January for two weeks. And we took the opportunity, being away and out of our house, to have some work done. Now, we bought a house that has a little bit of history to it and needed a little bit of work done to it with the thinking that we would do the work ourselves. And after the ?rst month, we realized that that really is not a good idea. Um, my husband’s pretty handy. He’s good with tools.  He can pretty much do anything that needs to be done in this house. However, when it’s something that he needs a little bit of help with, and he will not ask for help from anyone else–he depends on me to do it — it usually turns into a ?asco. Um, and essentially this happens because, um, I don’t know if I just don’t have the experience that he has with tools, or if there is just some sort of unspoken language that he and other carpenters may have that I’m just not privy to. I don’t know.

Anyway, it’s just not a good thing when we try to do projects. So, our trip to Peru was just the perfect time to get done a huge project, which was putting in a…a new wood ?oor. Now, while we were away, I thought this would also be a good time to put up a…we have a…a year ago, I gave my husband a wall mural map of the world. We ordered it from National Geographic and it arrived and it’s fantastic. It’s just a great thing to put on the wall. And, uh, we look at it a lot. And we really enjoy looking at it. But, um, but anyway, putting it up was a lot, was going to be a lot harder than I anticipated and knowing the way that Joe and I, uh, are not able to do house projects in a way that, uh, where we won’t have a divorce.

Um, I decided that while we were away in Peru, having the ?oor put in, we’ll hire someone who does wallpaper and they can come in and hang up the pieces of wallpaper that make the wall mural. The three different pieces that…they all have to ?t just exactly because if not, you know, then you might have half of Africa and half of South, uh, South America together, and that just wouldn’t work.  So…  – which is probably what would have happened if Joe and I did it.

So, um, anyway, we went away for the vacation. We came back to the beautiful wood ?oor and the wallpaper was up.  And after I saw it up, I kind of thought,”Well, shoot, we should, maybe we should have tried this ourselves. Maybe we could have done it.” But I called the wallpaper guy just to see how things had gone, and he said that we did the right thing. That it was not an easy chore. Um, as I said, our house is a little old, and because of that, and the settling, and all of the renovations that had been done on the house, there’s no wall, uh, or corner, that’s straight.

So, uh, which made me feel a lot better about our decision to hire somebody to do it. I’m sure if we had hung it, we would be divorced and it would be up on the wall in lots of different, crooked pieces. So, luckily, it all turned out just ?ne.