My Name Is Paulius, and My Wife is a Decorataholic

My wife is a decorate-aholic…seriously.

Just to give you an example, I finally put my foot down and refused to let her change the furniture around in the living room. (There is actually a good reason for this, I don’t feel like having to set up the TV, VCR and Surround sound system every time we have a ‘change’. Those speakers are a bugger to move.)

Anyway, since I turned the living room into a furniture-moving-free zone, I noticed that all the pictures in the living room rarely stay in the same place for more than 24 hours.

It’s a compulsion of hers, what more can I say?

However, since I stopped her changing things on an almost daily basis, whenever she gets the chance to do a bit of decorating, she goes into overdrive.

Take yesterday, for example.

Our bed was practically destroyed (no newlywed jokes please, my mum reads this), so we where in the market for a new one. My mother-in-law said that she had a spare king-size that we could have for free, gratis, and for nothing.

As far as I was concerned, replacing our bed consisted of the following:

1. Remove old bed.


2. Get new bed.


3. Put new bed in old bed’s place.

Sunny, however, having almost 6 months decorating frustration to work out, decided that instead of my plan, we would:

1. Remove old bed


2. Re-model the bedroom by tearing out the built in dresser and closets


3. Turn space created by removing the built in dresser and closets into a material-hung uber-headboard


4. Have the bed on the opposite wall.


5. Get a new nightstand.

In short, getting a new bed turned into creating a new bedroom.

It doesn’t stop there. You see, my parents are coming to stay in a few months.

Now, Sunny and I have an agreement when it comes to major decorating. We both have to agree on what we’re going to do, and when. To be perfectly honest, I don’t really give a damn about decorating (being male and all), so our usual agreement is Sunny picks everything out, but I have the power of veto.

Unfortunately, she’s created a way around this little problem (you know the one, getting me to agree.)

I’m not sure what her way is actually called, but I think it’s called ‘lying through her teeth’ with a mixture of ‘lying through omission’.

For example, when my parents first decided to visit, Sunny said to me:

“Well, if your parents are coming to stay, we’re going to have to clean the place up a little bit.”

I replied (While watching TV) “Mmm Hmm.”

You see, to me, ‘cleaning the place up a little bit’ involves, well, cleaning the place up a little bit. This means going through the house, cleaning it, a well as cleaning all the things that we don’t clean on a regular basis (Shampoo the carpet, take down and wash the curtains etc.)

However, Sunny, in a brilliant display of mental gymnastics and double think, deduced the following:

1. Cleaning the place up a bit involves major decorating.


2. It’s not her fault if I don’t understand the ‘correct’ definition of ‘cleaning’.


3. She told me what we needed to do, and I agreed.


4. Therefore she has free-reign to do whatever the hell she pleases.

The first I knew about it was when she started showing me paint samples.



Maybe there’s some kind of support group I can sign her up to.