A WEEK AT THE "BARBERSHOP."

Many years ago, I bought an antique barbershop chair. I thought it would be a fun conversational piece to have in my house. Unfortunately, however, for a number of different reasons, I never did much with it...just stuck it in a corner of one room and pretty much forgot about it.

But all that changed this week, after my husband, John, asked me what I intended to do with the chair. For one thing, it's big. And heavy! So it was taking up space we wanted for something else, and neither he nor my son, Shane, wanted to move it repeatedly around our house. I explained to John that when I'd originally bought the chair, I'd had some vague notion of eventually using it somehow in the powder room at my old house, but that the powder room in our own house was just too small to accommodate the chair.

"No problem," John said.

And with that, he proceeded to knock out two walls to increase the size of our powder room. So instead of a separate powder room, utility room, and a shades-of-the-70s! wet bar (that was "dead space" to us, since we never used it, and that was previously part of our family room), we now have one large powder room that is in the process of being transformed into an antique "barbershop." I even managed to find a Victorian-style wallpaper border that has antique barbershop chairs and other barbershop paraphernalia on it---all on a background the exact same shade of burgundy as my own chair's leather back and seat. I couldn't believe my good luck!

While our washer and dryer will remain, they'll be tucked away out of sight behind a small half wall and beneath a countertop---all a far more practical arrangement than what we had previously. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that once our antique "barbershop" is all finished, Shane (a typical teenager) will be a bit more cheerful about doing his laundry! *g*