Toward the end of last winter my husband, the interior designer/decorator/workman/artist decided that he was no longer enamoured of the original work he had done on the powder room adjacent our kitchen and laundry room, nor in the short hallway leading from kitchen to laundry room. I remained fond of the decor, and demurred, when he proposed changing it all over to another decorating scheme. As usual, he listened to me, then proceeded to do as he felt the situation required.

First to be disposed of was the wallpaper we had both chosen years ago and which so complemented the other decorative aspects of both little rooms. It pained me, but my husband set about with resolve to completely transform both areas. He installed new lighting arrangements, and designed and executed millwork with which to give character, as he put it, to the walls, above the ceramic wall tiles he had originally installed ten years earlier.

And when all the millwork was completed and installed, suddenly it was early spring, and other work called him away from the interior of the house, to focus on work that needed to be done on the exterior. And which work kept him busy throughout the spring and summer and fall. And with late fall came the moment when he had completed those other chores, some self-imposed, some requiring urgent attention.

Now, he has returned to the completion of the work he had begun last winter. He has been applying base-coat paint to the millwork that he had painstakingly put in place almost a year earlier. It is finicky, time-consuming work, something he hadn't quite anticipated when he designed the millwork with the thought that that type of embellishment was just what was needed to lift those areas out of the ordinary.