If a colour could be said to have a personality, here's how the colour the spousal unit chose for our mud room would greet you.

"HEY, HOW ARE YA? MY NAME IS YELLOW WHAT'S YOUR NAME?"

Oh yes, it is that loud.

Month three of the spousal unit being out of work just ended. Thankfully, the phone has begun to ring with folks eager to start their spring and summer renovations. Hallelujah.

Back at the beginning of January, when we were already a month in to his work drought, we decided to do something, anything, rather than sit there glumly and stare at the telephone.

I've always been overwhelmed by our mud room. You come into the house through it and it is always a mess because we just don't have any storage space. For years the spousal unit has promised that he'll build a wall of cupboards out there that we can use to deal with the clutter, and for years nothing happened.

We decided this would be the year of the mud room.

An inventory of the wood he had in his workshop uncovered the lovely butternut we had sawn up a decade ago into rough boards. There was enough to make face frames and cabinet doors.

The grocery store where I shop gives Air Miles. The great thing about them is that I can convert them into gift certificates for other businesses. I had enough that I could get $240 in gift certificates for a local hardware store chain. Woo Hoo! That covered paint, urethane, stain and enough porcelain tiles to make a relatively inexpensive countertop for the cabinets.

My pack rat spousal unit had stockpiled enough plywood in his workshop to make the cabinet carcasses. We decided to bust into the piggy bank to buy the hardware. Progress. There would be progress.

What I forgot is that before there is progress there is always turmoil. I have been living for a months with a double row of butternut boards stacked in my kitchen so they dry to the humidity level of our home. The cats love this wood. They treat it as a lovely place to sleep, to lurk, to play.

The mud room was utterly torn up. All around it was strewn the carcasses for the cabinets. I have been urethaning, sanding, and re-urethaning them. The spousal unit had to get them out of his workshop to make way for the next part of the project, the cutting, planing, sanding and fitting of the butternut.

If I want to use my washer and dryer, which live in the mud room, I have to weave my way through piles of construction material and lift off a small hill of whatever that has accumulated on their flat surfaces. Sometimes I feel as if I'm living in an episode of that tee vee show Hoarders.

And, of course, there have been endless heated battlesnegotiations about colours. Oh, but there have been negotiations.

The spousal unit loathes anything that he considers beige. Beige, in the spousal unit's world, is any colour that is pale. Now don�t get me wrong. I love colour myself and the lovely deep red we had on the walls of the mud room is certainly testimony to that.

But, well, the Great Stain War of 2010 ended with us compromising on a colour called Red Chestnut for the cabinets. That left us with dark brown wood with reddish undertones. Couple that with the dark red walls of the mudroom, and it felt like a cave. We needed a lighter colour on the walls.

The Great Stain War of 2010 was a mere skirmish compared to the battle over the colour to paint the walls of the porch. I eventually wore him down toWe agreed on a cheery yellow, but our personal definitions of what exactly was a cheery yellow were, well, divergent.

In a fit of weakness, I let him pick the yellow. Two coats of primer and two coats of yellow later and all I can say about it is, "Yepper, it sure is yellow. Oh well.

The shells of the cabinets-to-be have become the best playhouse evah as far as our cats are concerned. Especially coveted is the perch atop the upper cabinets. I never know who I'm going to see perched atop the mountain when I come into the mudroom. It seems as if there is always at least one cat there.

We're restless for spring, the cats and I. There are no words for how much I miss growing things.

--Marn