Broom Tears Through the Wallpaper

by Joan
(Conrad, IA, USA)

Years ago my son and his brand new wife rented a small home in a nearby community. He and his wife asked the landlord if they could do some decorating and were given permission to do so.

My son’s mother-in-law and I volunteered to go down and wallpaper several rooms in their home since they were both busy working and since neither one of them had any experience in wallpapering.

His mother-in-law and I drove down to their home with our wallpaper supplies, including ladders and boards to stand on since we would have to wallpaper the ceiling also. My son and his wife had picked out the paper they wanted.

Everything went fine at first. But the other woman was about seven inches shorter than me. I was 5 ft. 9 in. tall and she was approximately 5 ft. 2 in. tall. So when we got up on the plank that we had laid between two ladders, she needed to use a broom to hold up her end of the wallpaper.

Since this was a rented home, my son and his wife did not purchase the most expensive paper, and when we were trying to put the wallpaper on the ceiling, the broom the other lady was using tore right through the wallpaper and it came falling down on top of her and me!

Needless to say, that brought on a spell of laughing and crying. But we got a new piece of wallpaper cut and pasted, got back on the plank and successfully completed papering the two rooms.

It was an experience we still laugh about today. Nobody else was there to see what happened so it is not something we can really share with anybody else.