As in life, we must find the right balance for our walls
- Laura Moore: Housebroken
- November 16, 2019
- 940
Our place just loves having her walls decorated.
And fortunately for her, we have lots of pictures and artwork to indulge her.
The main problem, though, is that we have accumulated so much art and decorations that we are in danger of running out of wall space. And just how much wall-hanging weight can our walls handle?
Many years ago I inherited a number of original, very old oil paintings. They were not to our taste, being of dead birds and other rather depressing topics. But they came to us whether or not we wanted them.
Our then-house was not at all interested in depressing her walls with such art, so they were sent to an auction house to be sold. They were sold but for nowhere near the amounts we had hoped. Obviously famous old paintings of the dark variety weren’t that appealing to other walls, not just ours.
When the grandchildren began to arrive, pictures of their cute selves began to fill up any wall space we could finagle, until we had no more.
Actually our house felt strangled with so much hanging on her walls, and she began to rebel. First a rather large picture fell down in the middle of the night. That sent our dogs into hysterics and got us out of bed with alacrity. The house had our attention and was demanding we relieve her of some wall weight.
It didn’t take long after that warning for us to begin to bring out the albums. Soon several albums were full of tastefully arranged family photos.
Our house heaved a huge sigh of relief, and our rooms even began to look bigger. She still wants to have her walls decorated but with fewer pictures and perhaps a small amount of lightweight art.
We seemed to have reached a compromise. The walls look lovely, our house is happy and we don’t have to jump out of bed to calm hysterical dogs in the middle of the night.