Labor Weekend
What a busy, busy labor day weekend. The wife finally talked me into
completing a
house project
we started quite a while ago. For those that don’t rememeber,
the project in question was brought about by a small scale war inside of our
closet – a war that neither the wife or I witnessed first hand. Our lack of
attendance, however, didn’t free us from the job of cleaning up the aftermath.
As a result, the closet enjoyed a nice demolition and rebuilding project
more than a month ago. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you ask the wife), the
closet renovations meant that, all of a sudden, the colors of our bedroom
walls didn’t match our closet at all. The closet was now a nice mixture
of burgandy red and light grey which, not by accident, matched the
bedroom comforter perfectly. The bedroom itself, however, was a
beautiful shade dingy yellow.
Actually, it was the dingy yellow from hell. You might think that hell is painted
with a red brush but my personal hell is probably painted with antique white, the
slightly off-white of the ages.
Somebody, somewhere probably dropped some yellow paint into a vat of white and said, “Wow, perfect.” After all, who doesn’t want walls that look like a mix
of dried parchment and the hair of a ninety year old ex-blonde who hasn’t
quite lost that yellow tinge. We could have pasted the original copy
of the
Constitution
on the wall and not have been able to tell where it ends and the wall began.
Apparently, antique white was once popular, particularly with the older
crowd. Since we bought the house from a little old lady, I suppose it’s
no surprise that the house was covered with the stuff. That and the
obligatory “old person” smell just came with the territory.
I still have nightmares of trying to rid the house of that stink. I had
always assumed that smell came from a nasty concoction of Ben-Gay.
In this case, it turned out to be mothballs – mounds and mounds of mothballs.
I found them everywhere. Closets, cabinets, the crawl space – no place was
safe from the mothball infection. I found them for months after we purchased the house. But I digress…
Here’s a tip for would-be painters. Never — I repeat, never —
paint a room two different colors. It’s simple multiplication.
Two colors means double the taping, double the painting,
and double the waiting. I suppose,
if you get technical, the physical area doesn’t change (not that I wouldn’t
have sworn it did over the weekend), but where you would normally put two
coats of paint, you now have four. Waiting for four separate coats of
paint to dry is as exciting as it sounds. It made for a long weekend where I
can’t actually say I worked hard, I just worked over and over again.
When it was all complete, the wife and I congratulated ourselves on a job well
done. The room now looks worthy to be our nightly resting place,
making the end result worth the toil. Now its
on to the baby’s room. I wonder how long I can put that one off
(hint – I bet it won’t be more than 4 months).
