under wraps

We are doing our best to exorcise our house of its gloom - as I explained to a colleague the other day, it's not a depressing house (or we would have high-tailed it out of here), but it sometimes seems a rather sad house - the kind of house that one hears gently sighing to itself.   And there may be nothing we can do about this - we can't rewrite its past (which is pretty much unknown to us).   However, having it painted - all the parts we haven't already painted ourselves, and repainting the living room (that an awful painter called Jerry had left a sickly lemon yellow) has been a huge improvement.   Somewhere under the plastic wrapping is our furniture, which looked less as though it had been carefully enclosed by Christo than that it was fighting to breathe.   But the image of these covered sofas and cabinet, table and lamps, suggests, I'm hoping, a benevolent aura trying hard to establish itself.   And it's also a visual meditation on how strange the familiar looks when muffled under wraps.