What once was a study nook in a teenager’s bedroom eventually became an office’s trophy nook where some of the 133 trophies displayed throughout the room have found a home.
We just finished painting Bob’s home office – AKA the “trophy room” (A place for everything – and every well-dusted thing in its place). The room hadn’t been repainted since our youngest child claimed the space as her teenage bedroom. She’s 38. Repainting was just a tad bit overdue.
It was an exhausting labor of love. Baseball trophies — well over a hundred of them — taken down off shelves one-by-one. Plaques, ribbons, hats, bats all came down too, exposing great expanses of yellowish paint still in such surprisingly good condition that, for a second or two, we actually considered saving ourselves a ton of work by scrapping the whole painting project. But we quickly agreed the yellow paint that once nicely complemented a teenager’s paisley bedspread really didn’t work as a backdrop for shiny gold trophies, so we pressed on.
We took pictures of how everything had been arranged prior to painting, hoping to save time putting the trophies back in place once the job was done. Bob tried (but failed) to pare down the number of trophies to redisplay. Everything had a story to tell or a memory attached, each too good to simply pack away. So after the more subtle, office-suitable beige paint dried, back it all went — all one-hundred plus trophies back to their prepainting positions.
This room redo was a long time coming, and we like the transformation. To the untrained eye, it probably looks almost the same as before, but to us it seems more calm and relaxing, despite the sunlight that still bounces off the trophies in all directions.
We invited our daughter, the room’s previous occupant, to take a look so she could see how different the space was with its more sophisticated paint color. She hardly noticed any change, other than the two pieces of furniture that had switched places. We were more than a little disappointed. Was all that work even worth the effort?
Absolutely! Not only do Bob and I think the more neutral wall color looks much better, but taking down and putting back those 133 trophies (yes, I counted them on their way back to the shelves) gave us an opportunity to relive many special memories and recall the players and families we came to know through baseball. And we would do it all over again. ALL of it – the painting AND the 33 years of baseball.