A warning to all men: never leave a stubborn woman alone when she’s got a bug up her ass.

So, if any of you actually read through my tirade, Straight American Men and Relationships, you know that our first attempt to shove our queen-size box spring up the stairwell of our old-new house was shot to hell, as were all of my expectations for the bedroom it was suppose to go into. So we slept in the downstairs bedroom with the weird layout, and no privacy from the rest of the first floor instead. And I was trying to make peace with that. Really, I was.

Well, a couple of days ago, I dug out some gardening and decorating books to do some soul soothing (those are my fun, selfish hobbies), and I saw a bedroom I liked. It had mocha brown walls. It wasn’t the perfect shade of calming grey-blue that I had upstairs, but it was pretty. So I walked the book into the dreaded bedroom, and I tried to picture mocha brown walls.

It didn’t work. The room used to have 70’s brown paneling (the only room in the original house without plastered walls except for the remodeled bathrooms) that had been painted with a thin layer of beige, so you could still see the stripes from the paneling through it. I would be painting brown paneling that was now beige, back to brown again. Ew. I tried to work with the stripes, saying, “Well, I could clear glaze every fourth fake board so it would look kinda cool…” but in my gut, I knew it would be a lot of work that would never make me happy.

“Your bedroom’s upstairs,” the mule in me complained. I turned and looked at the stairs. The opening seemed deceptively large. I reran the first attempt through my head. Hubby had been at the top pulling, and I had been pushing from the bottom. The box spring had wedged under the trim on the second floor railing and the ceiling on the first floor. I wondered, if I angled it the other way….

And that was it. The bug was officially up my ass and I was pissed all over again. I yanked the mattress out of the way, up-righted the box spring in front of the stairs, and began the slow, arduous process of pushing and pulling back up again.

It wasn’t a smooth transition. I had to rip a shelf down when the top got stuck in an alcove in front of the stairs. Then I had to rip a plastic cover off of the bottom of the box spring when it got stuck on a tread, but I was slowly climbing, and I was way further than the first attempt had been.

There was just enough give to get past the first piece of trim under the upstairs railing, but on the second I got stuck. I could pull the box spring out of the way, but I wasn’t strong enough to pull the box spring up at the same time. And it had to come up now; it was beyond a point of no return.

I had no choice. I had to call the husband. “Say,” I chirped pleasantly, “you got ten minutes to come home from the office?” (We live in the same town our business is in, so I knew it wouldn’t be a big deal).

The cheeriness made him immediately suspicious. “Uh, oh, what did you do?”

“It’ll only take ten minutes,” I promised vaguely.

So he came home, surveyed my craziness with his usual stoicism, and then said, “Well, you got it up a lot further than last time. What do you need me to do?”

He pushed from the bottom on my command while I did the pulling, and all those TV dramatizations of birthing babies inevitably filled my head as I was yelling, “Push!…Push!…That’s right!…Almost there!…Just one more!” When my husband did his final grunt and the box spring emerged from the opening, I simply couldn’t help myself. “Congratulations! You just gave birth to a box spring. It’s a queen, so, it’s a Girl!”

Yeah, he thought the joke was lame too. I don’t really care. I have my bedroom back, and the downstairs office is coming together nicely. I crushed the ass bug, for now.

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