When I was a newlywed living in New Mexico, we had bought a house that had a “baby’s room”. The room was very cute. It was painted a pastel color with a wallpaper border in the middle of all 4 walls. The walls in our house were a type of stucco or textured wall, as that was the style for the region we lived in. I decided that I wanted the baby’s room to not look like a nursery because I wasn’t sure if I would get pregnant or have a baby and I didn’t want to have it be a reminder to me.

One week when my husband was gone traveling for work I decided I would tackle removing this wallpaper border. I had never removed wallpaper before and I did no research as to how to remove it. Remember, at this time the internet was not what it is today and there were no online resources for DIY. It seemed to me in looking at it, that it could just be tugged and pulled off as some of it wasn’t really attached flat to the wall because of the textured surface. Unfortunately, the tugging and some scraping that I did to try and lift the wallpaper damaged the walls some. Pieces of the stucco would come off with the wallpaper. And although I was able to remove the border the damage it left behind was fairly noticeable with missing chunks of plaster.

It was at this time, with this disaster, that I was introduced to spackle. Spackle is amazing. It’s a miracle worker in all sorts of situations. It’s like using frosting to patch a cake you messed up. You can use it to patch, form, and shape by sanding or applying with meticulous care to match the existing wall. I was no pro at this, but the material did most of the work for me and I was able to creatively make the spackle follow a similar pattern to the existing stucco. Once it was painted, you could not see the outline of a border and the pattern was good enough that it was not too noticeable that it had been patched by a rookie.

I will admit that I am MUCH more experienced in patching and using spackle now then I was back then and I still think it’s a miracle worker. It’s inexpensive and easy to use. Depending on which type you buy it can dry very quickly and can even change colors as it dries so you know when it’s ready to paint.

The room no longer looked like a baby’s room. But the room haunted me in some ways. There was another time when my husband was again gone traveling and I was alone in the house. One day I was sitting in our living room, which had a view of that nursery. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman pass quickly by the door to walk to the other side. She had long hair and was wearing a skirt. I sometimes thought I heard faint music that sounded like a baby’s mobile that would normally be above a crib.

I tried to put what I thought I saw and experienced out of my mind, but did tell my husband what had happened. A few weeks after I had this experience, I was in town at a nursery looking at plants and having a gentleman that worked there help me identify some of the trees we had at our new home, showing him the leaves I had brought with me. He was curious as to where I lived and where I had purchased a home. I told him the address. He knew of the previous owner. He said he was a very nice man who had just remarried. He had lost his first wife to cancer. I asked him if they had any children and he said they had a baby. My heart sank as I thought about the feelings she must have had when she placed that border up in that room waiting for her baby to arrive. I never forgot about her. When we later moved from New Mexico leaving that house behind I wondered if she ever came back to visit the nursery.