Picture hanging party

I should have known better than to ask my husband’s opinion about hanging the picture, but it was a portrait of the two of us. I just couldn’t decide whether I should buy a new frame or rip off the professional backing of a framed print in an expensive frame and replace it with the portrait.
He looked at the picture and the expensively carved frame, “You sure you don’t want that print?”
“I’m sure. I bought it for the frame, not for the picture.”
“Well it needs a matte to make it look right. I have matting in the bedroom.”
I should have known what would happen, after all he hasn’t had a lot of opportunities to use the tools for cutting matting since he purchased them.
At any rate I ended up spending the next fourteen hours pulling family portraits out of picture albums and frames out of the cubby holes where I had stored them during our first and second phases of remodeling.
With the last interior wall painted and final floor covered with carpet, tile or parquet it was time to begin hanging curtains, drapes and pictures.
I had shopped for drapes and came home with a catalogue marked with my top five choices. My husband decided he liked my first choice, bought them and hung the drapes. That spurred me on to decorate the rest of our beige, cream and off-white house into a land of color and personality with pictures. I didn’t realize until I asked his opinion about one frame how long it could take to hang few pictures.
My husband is a perfectionist, detailed and quite thorough – and none of that is redundant. I am a slap-happy, get the job done and move onto something else type person.
I figured it would take me a couple hours to sort out the frames I did not want to use, slap a few photos into the ones I wanted and punch the fresh paint with holes as I studied out the best spot to hang a picture. I thought I would be finished long before he finished sanding and varnishing the new bedroom doors.
I would have finished early – if I had not asked his input. Fourteen hours and twenty pictures later, the doors were still unfinished but he had coordinated, cut, matted and used up all the frames.
Thinking aloud, I weighed the options of hanging the finished pictures down the hall or just in the living room. He let me know he really wanted his finished products to be near the center of attention and activity.
Somewhere between 10 p.m. and midnight he laid all the framed pictures of the family on the floor and began arranging them to balance size, color and wall space. Quite unlike my haphazard ‘poke a hole and hope the next one lines up evenly’.
As usual he did a precise, accurate, neat job. From my easy chair, where I finally got to sit, it looks great.
I can sit there and study the pages in our numerous photo albums noting how my husband’s hair grays a few years ahead of mine as we join the ranks of grandparents. Or I can sit back, glance around the room and see the family grow in size until we are eight then shrink to two as each child leaves to start their own set of portraits.