#133. or, There's a leak in my bed

  Currently, we are in the midst of renovating our bedroom. Nothing quite as extensive as blowing a wall out and actually changing the physical configuration of the room. But still, the floor is down to the plywood and we're replacing all of the trims and the window. So, in terms of sleeping facilities, my wife and I are somewhat........transient.

  Before we could start this renovation, we had to go through some of our stuff and, well.....weed things out. Now, we've been together for over 20 wonderful years. And fortunately, when we moved in together, the woman I love, came with household things. Like everything necessary to function from day to day. The only thing of value that I brought along was my official framed, 1989, Batman movie poster. Which she did grudgingly let me hang on our living room wall for a little while, or at least until she found something less man-cave-ish to replace it with. Now, my poster lives in the basement with our stinky children.

  Anyways, we had to cull some of our belongings. It's gotten a little easier to do that as I get older, but I still catch her rolling her eyes when I get, perhaps overly defensive, at her suggestion of throwing out my 30 year old, TV Guide collection and my zip-lock bag, full of broken wrist watch pieces. Some things are just sacred to a man. Plus, I may need that stuff some day?

  Now, because I'm always thinking about my wife, (besides the every 7 seconds thing) I wanted her to have the semblance of an actual bedroom while ours was in transition. So, I took it upon myself to transform our basement work room into the new, temporary, master bedroom. I use the term workroom, rather loosely, because while that's what we intended it to be, it's probably better described as the hell hole where we throw everything that we think we should keep, yet never use. It's the room that we keep the door closed on.

  So, I cleaned the workroom/hell hole out, and my son hauled away a whole trailer load of junk. It took me 3 days but I turned that space into a cozy area for us. I brought down a dresser for her, hung temporary closet rods, and set up our BYOB. (bring your own bed) This might come as a shock you, but sleeping on a bed, that folds up into a space slightly larger that a backpack, is not quite as luxurious as it sounds. It has a collapsible framework and an air mattress that slips into an attached sleeve. Really, it's not so bad, except I think it must have a slow leak. Over the few days we've been using it, I noticed that while we lay in it together, everything is fine. But when one person would get out, all of the air would fill the void left by that person, and whoever was left in bed, would drop down onto the framework. And because I suffer from the inability to jump out of bed, bright eye'd and bushy tailed, I would try to find the most comfortable position left available, by contorting my body to avoid all the high spots on the framework. Also, if whoever had gotten up, say to use the can or something, returned and flopped into bed, the person who had stayed, would be shot off the mattress, a few inches into the air. Which was fun, until my wife got mad at me for repeatedly getting in and out of bed to bounce her into the air and made me stop.

  One other thing that I overlooked, was making our bedroom right next to the furnace room. Actually, I had thought that one layer of drywall would sufficiently muffle the sounds of 2 furnaces rumbling away. I had failed to consider that while the layer of drywall was there, (which has no sound muffling qualities whatsoever, just in case your wondering)   all of the duct work runs directly into the workroom/hell hole/cozy bedroom. You would be correct if you were to assume that two tin boxes running the length of a room amplify sound, like to 100 times louder than if we had actually slept right on top of the furnaces. It's like trying to sleep in the engine test facility of a DC10 hanger.

  But we're getting used to it. I have to re-inflate the bed every other day to keep it firm, but that's not such a big deal. And while it's still noisy as hell, we seem to be getting used to the constant rumble of the furnaces. I've also noticed that there's something oddly comforting about laying in bed and actually being able to reach out in the dark and touch some of my power tools.

   ......................although I'm not sure that my wife appreciates that perk quite as much as I do?



This week, I'll be joining up with the other Dudes at Dude Write, with this post. I encourage you to pop over and read what the guys bring to the table. You can get there by clicking on THIS LINK