Yes, after six years of living here, I am finally tackling the enormous problem that is The Scourge Of The Beige.
]]>Yes, after six years of living here, I am finally tackling the enormous problem that is The Scourge Of The Beige.
Yep, I'm finally working on painting the living room, foyer, and reading room. Since these rooms are all open to each other, they need to be the same color if at all possible. (Those of you who have been to our house are probably thinking, "Don't you need to do the kitchen as well?" The answer to that is yes, but that room has floor-to-ceiling wallpaper and will be dealt with eventually. Just not now.)
Given that my spouse is having A Really Long Month at work, I'm trying to be nice by not destroying the main living areas of our house. Therefore, I'm attempting reasonability, in the form of working on only one wall at a time. If I tackle a wall, it is completely done—repainted, trim work done, tape taken down, outlet covers replaced and furniture moved back home—before Jeff drags in at $random_late_hour.
Today: the wallpaper border in the foyer. Conquer that, and I get to repaint the entire foyer today.
For those of you wanting the Cliffs Notes version of the paint saga:
For those of you morbidly fascinated with painting, putting off doing real work, or amused by cat photos:
It's gonna be worth it. I knew it as soon as the first wall dried; suddenly all the white trim stood out and the red poinsettias looked bright and luscious against the gray-green, and our furniture no longer blended into the wall. (Just remind me of this project's worth as I take all the bookshelves down from the walls of the reading room, then scrub all the resulting green paint and wallpaper paste out of my hair.)
After that, a simple little invention: white cup hooks, screwed into the ceiling. Tiny little things that will blend into the ceiling, but which will do one thing wonderfully well: hold up Christmas lights.
Not that I'm planning for PHE or anything.
Nah. I'd never do anything like that. Seriously. I'm a seat-of-the-pants kind of girl.
Why are you laughing?
:P
Aside to you-know-who: thanks for pointing me to Joey Negro. That eighty-minute Southport mix has been rocking out the living room for a couple of days now. Deep disco/old-school house music. Cheesy groovitude, and plenty of it free for download.]]>
Even now, the word is still debatable, but my relief is not.
Do interior painting even once and you learn the dance: tape up, paint up, tape down, patch areas of missing color with new wall color, patch areas of new-color overspray with the trim color. Get off ladder. Sleep.
Almost there, kid.
I started yanking the tape down in earnest at seven-thirty tonight, and within thirty minutes the striped Medusa pile lay in the entranceway, ready to grab the pants leg of anyone who ventured too close. After the tape was down, I picked up the bucket of red paint and began to clean up lines made ragged by the tape's removal.
]]>Even now, the word is still debatable, but my relief is not.
Do interior painting even once and you learn the dance: tape up, paint up, tape down, patch areas of missing color with new wall color, patch areas of new-color overspray with the trim color. Get off ladder. Sleep.
Almost there, kid.
I started yanking the tape down in earnest at seven-thirty tonight, and within thirty minutes the striped Medusa pile lay in the entranceway, ready to grab the pants leg of anyone who ventured too close. After the tape was down, I picked up the bucket of red paint and began to clean up lines made ragged by the tape's removal.
After that was done, I thought about attempting the latter half of patching: taking the white and covering up the areas where the red extended just a little further than I would have liked. I realized that such things were best suited for sunlight, and could wait until the morning.
Morning. If I had made it this far, I could begin to think of packing up and heading home and indeed, once thought, the idea did not leave my mind the rest of the evening. Home: grey carpets, orange-and-white cats.
My friends accuse me of being a hermit, and I joyfully admit the truth of their allegations. Anyone who has seen me during one of my long-distance walkabouts knows I do it as much for the joy of discovery as I do for the immense, blissful comfort of the moment of return.
Will Kari like what we've done? I certainly hope so; we have used the colors she chose, and followed the opinions she gave to Jody, not knowing how attentively they were received. I except that she'll be a little shocked at the unexpected color change, but judging from the reaction of her mother to the unfinished product, I think I've managed to do a halfway decent job.
My color choices for rooms are, admittedly, somewhat limited, but even I have to admit that the warm yellow that Kari chose (a color I wouldn't even have considered) makes for a comforting, sunny kitchen. I thought it overly bright at first, but as the color spread from wall to wall, I was surprised to realize just how much less sterile the kitchen felt.
For yet another night, I appear to be wearing as much paint as I've applied; I fear I will be scratching paint off of my arms, out from under my fingernails, and off of my scalp for at least another day or two. While the red stains more, and makes me appear like the friendly local axe murderer, the yellow seems to predominate.
Apparently yellow paint just likes me.
Given morning sunlight, I will pop open the tub of white paint and fix the places where the red runneth over. That done, I will tidy up my workspace and re-pack my bag; depending on the time, Jody and I might have lunch, but after that, I'll head northwest.
On the way home, I'll reclaim the hour I lost when I crossed into the Eastern time zone. I plan to take it home and give it as a gift to Edmund, who undoubtedly will, as his wanton nature dictates, squander it in long moments of kneading and purring. Tenzing will require at least twenty minutes of having his ears gently fussed and stroked, and then he will bury himself in the crook of my leg and sleep for hours.
If I'm lucky, I'll remember to settle in with a book or a movie before the cats find me. I might as well be entertained while they extract apologies from me.
Sleep beckons. After an evening of precarious balancing on countertop while reaching over cabinets to paint between them and the ceiling, my body insists it is entitled.
]]>Current music: Marvin Gaye, What's Going On
Damien Rice, O
Jimmy Eat World, Clarity
"oh my Lord
why's it taking you so long
to give me grace
and the dignity to right these wrongs"
"oh my Lord
why's it taking you so long
to give me grace
and the dignity to right these wrongs"
- Jonatha Brooke, 'Deny' (bonus track from _Steady Pull_, 2001)
It's a chorus, really; voices in my head taking on the voices of two particular friends, taking their words, doubling, tripling them until the sounds of their voices drown out my own.
It's been a long, long week. Week and a half, more like, according to my watch, which says it's going to be Wednesday before I manage two more paragraphs at tonight's snail-ish rate.This site has been silent during the past week and a half, to respect the privacy of two of my friends. I love both of them dearly, fiercely; I don't know any other way. I've spent most of my waking time in the past week and a half watching their friendship literally disintegrate before my eyes; devastation, hurt, and anger made flesh.
I've cried. I've lost sleep. I've talked until I'm blue in the face, and finally, now, I find myself sitting in an empty, paint-fumed house singing back to Stevie Wonder, scratching out thoughts in a text window.
I don't know how to accept that I can't help those I care about when they so obviously need - someone, something. Comfort. Grace. Peace. The friendship that is, for now, lost.
* * * * *
I am in Atlanta, and have been since Friday night. Saturday night's costume lies in my car, wrinkled and in need of a wash...rather like the rest of me. Jeff rode back to Huntsville with a friend, and I stayed in Atlanta with the car, and headed to Jody's to help paint his house.
It's a surprise, see. Kari, his wife, picked out colors for the main floor of their house, and I agreed to come stay with Jody for a few days to effect the transformation while Kari was out of state on a business trip.
I didn't bargain on painting to be a meditative exercise on the futility of trying to make things right. Since Monday morning I have slapped paint up on walls with a vengeance that frightens me, leaves me exhausted at the end of the day, but has not yet slowed the chatter-clack of my thoughts.
The truth is that I'm angry at myself; angry because I understand that the ideas of parallel and intersection are not just mathematical concepts. They are easily demonstrated in a three-dimensional, emotional world, often with devastating results. I knew two months ago when these friends left parallel, aiming slowly for each other, aiming for a confrontation that was as certain as it was going to be horrific.
I'm angry not because I did nothing, but because I did not do enough. I had opportunities to try to correct what might (or might not) have been inevitable, to steer them away from each other. At the time I voiced my concerns as openly as I thought was appropriate, but I look back now and question my conduct. I wonder if but for a few conversations of brutal honesty, perhaps some of this devastation could have been avoided.
(Cassandra.)
I've wanted to shoot them and to comfort them, and that's just today.
* * * * *
The entranceway is done; all that remains is to cut the tape down tomorrow and that section of the job is finished. As soon as I write this entry, I will head upstairs to apply what I pray is the last coat of red paint necessary to complete the dining room.
Red paint is translucent, not opaque. Reaching the intended final result requires time, patience, and multiple layers. The first layer goes on pink, with each additional layer slowly blending away lap marks and deepening the accumulated color toward the intended result.
There's a moral in this somewhere, a moral about friendships and healing taking time and patience, and how standing on ladders and whacking myself with a red-laden paintbrush is supposed to make me see that connection.
I'd be a liar if I said anything but this: I want off the ladder, I want the paint out of my hair, and while I realize that, short of comfort and friendship, there is nothing I can do for my friends, I want some way to make that right, too.
Time wields that paintbrush. Not me.
]]>Last night's phone call changed that. "I'm coming home a day earlier than planned."
]]>Last night's phone call changed that. "I'm coming home a day earlier than planned."
I had taken the phone call in the half-painted bedroom, fully intending to stare at the walls for a while and daydream about what pieces of art I'd hang on each wall.
Instead, I found myself calculating how fast I'd have to work to get the entire room finished before Wednesday night, when Jeff would come home.The trick to painting is that the painting itself doesn't take very long. The waste and delay comes from having to move the furniture, clean up all the bits and change and various dust animals hiding behind everything. Then you mask all the trim with paint, take down fixtures and outlet covers and protect their guts with tape....and only then do you actually get to paint.
Afterwards it's the same dance again: touch up the trim, wait for it all to dry, take down the tape, put the fixture covers back on, and then move the furniture back into place.
Correction. Let me back up and explain that again. It wasn't actually "moving furniture," it was "restoring the bed back from a chaos state." Only I would choose to do this sort of thing alone, instead of calling in a neighborly friend to help.
Then again, once the bed was disassembled, and the mattress and box springs tilted against a nearby chair, I did get to sit on the floor (with a wee bit of sweat for added decoration) and watch the Brothers Fang play chase-the-brother-kitty-up-the-mountain. I was exhausted just watching them.
But, in the end, there was something approaching a happy ending. I finished reassembling and de-taping the room exactly one hundred minutes before Jeff was due to land back in Huntsville, and found myself sitting on the bed staring at the newly-blued room with one word in my head:
Cheeseburger.
Actually, it wasn't sounding like that in my head. It was more like this: cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeseburger. (Extra e's to denote the gloppy factor.)
I picked up my keys, my wallet, and a handful of quarters and headed to the car. I had just enough time to stop off at Wendy's to buy a celebratory cheeseburger before heading to the airport. After paying for the burger, I drove with my left hand while scrabbling around with my right to pull out a couple of fries.
They were fresh.
I drove down 565 at eight over the speed limit, Danny Tenaglia blaring, while I ate the rest of the fries and greedily sucked the salt off my fingers. I pulled up at the terminal and picked Jeff up, welcoming him back home with a request: "Will you drive? I really, really, really want to eat this cheeseburger."
He drove. I ate the cheeseburger, and pronounced the rest of tonight to be Chardonnay Night, in which I'd celebrate the finishing-up of painting the master bedroom by quaffing about half a bottle of decent chardonnay by myself. I am writing this entry at the end of that half-bottle, and finding that it's doing wonders to soothe the frustration and tired muscles that come from days of painting.
How quickly I forget the process. By tomorrow afternoon I'll have forgotten the frustration of standing on ladders, of taping down corners and crannies, of painstakingly doing trim work. The room will still be blue, and I'll be wondering just what color I should paint the computer room.
Those who have listened to me complain about the process of painting the master bedroom may feel free to hit me.
]]>I don't hate the bathroom yet. Pretty fishtank. Lovely fishtank. I also don't hate wallpaper. I just hate the paste that holds it to the nearest wall.
]]>I don't hate the bathroom yet. Pretty fishtank. Lovely fishtank. I also don't hate wallpaper. I just hate the paste that holds it to the nearest wall.
Wallpaper paste does not react well to standard negotiation tactics. I have nothing it wants, so it ignores me and continues holding on to both sheetrock and wallpaper. I regret that it has forced me to resort to violence and chemical warfare, but what must be done, must be done.
I'd had shiny happy plans of moving on and starting to work on the master bathroom, but after my rigorous porcelain prayer session invoked by the scent of wallpaper stripper, I'm suddenly finding other chores that need my attention between now and dragon*con.
I survived the Bathtub Balancing Chore (ladder in tub, domesticat on ladder, paint can in one hand, brush in other hand) with only minor wobbles and rushes of adrenalin. It was, however, with great pleasure that I removed the shower curtains from their iniquitous relationship with my new sweaters and placed them back in their rightful places atop the tub.
The cats are still annoyed. They walk past their food bowls - which we've placed in the hallway so that they don't have to enter the bathroom for food - into the bathroom, where they present us with the It Smells Bad In Here face and demand to know where their food is. We're not sure who got the brightest kitties in that litter, but heaven help the other owners if we did.
Tomorrow shall consist of me balancing on the vanity while attempting feats of wallpaper paste de-conjuration while attempting not to kill myself by falling off said vanity. We still have to move the toilet and the mirror so that this job can be completed.
It will be completed, and soon. I will love it when it is done, when I have poured the excess paint into a tiny tub for storage, when I have stowed my exacto knife and thrown out the last of the used masking tape, when the blue on the walls is even at last and the shaved-off pieces of ex-wallpaper are evicted from my house.
Until that time...may my scraper stay clean and the fumes avoid my nose.
]]>Errata: for those of you who haven't checked the dragon*con website lately, Godhead and Voltaire have been added to the lineup. I'm pleased. I've never managed to catch any of Voltaire's legendarily-funny dragon*con shows, so hopefully I'll be able to make time to see him this year. Godhead is fantastic to crew for. They're respectful and friendly to tech staff, and just a genuine pleasure to work with. I'm with Jody on this one; I wouldn't be surprised if they're a Saturday headliner, and I certainly would be happy with the choice if they were.
]]>Errata: for those of you who haven't checked the dragon*con website lately, Godhead and Voltaire have been added to the lineup. I'm pleased. I've never managed to catch any of Voltaire's legendarily-funny dragon*con shows, so hopefully I'll be able to make time to see him this year. Godhead is fantastic to crew for. They're respectful and friendly to tech staff, and just a genuine pleasure to work with. I'm with Jody on this one; I wouldn't be surprised if they're a Saturday headliner, and I certainly would be happy with the choice if they were.
I am now on day 3000 of bathroom-painting. While all scientific evidence indicates that I'm on the first leg of painting a Möbius strip, I continue to persist. After a day of searching, I realized this morning that I had actually dropped the itty-bitty towel-bar-holding screw into an interdimensional time warp.
I convinced it to come back this morning. I quickly put the towel bar back up before it could change its mind.
Day 3000 of painting was also the most disturbing of the lot so far. Balancing a ladder in a tub and a domesticat on the ladder with a paint can in her hand is a recipe that just begged, soufflé-like, for disaster. So far, all disasters have been averted. As long as you don't count that nice long finger-shaped smear of blue paint in the bathtub a disaster. It'll come off with a bit of scrubbing, anyway. (Sotto voce to Jeff: it's not permanent, I swear!)
Day 3001 will involve my least favorite chore of this project: sweeping up the nasty bits of ex-wallpaper, confining the entropy to garbage bags, and making the room habitable again. The cats have filed a complaint with the Feline Board requesting clarification on why their room has been turned into a mess of old wallpaper, painting implements, and general disorder.
Every time they walk into the guest bathroom to eat, they glare at me. I expect retribution forthwith.
After entropy is contained, I hope to move the shower curtains back from the guest bedroom, where they're currently living. They've been getting awful chummy with those sweaters I bought a few weeks ago. Honestly, those shower curtains really don't need to be spending the night in there unchaperoned. Who knows what those naughty sweaters will do when I'm not around to keep an eye on their licentious behavior?
With that, I must tackle the other task hanging over my head: the refrigerator. We can hear muffled protest marches from behind the door, which does not bode well. We've apparently left food in there so long that they've completed the move from autonomous unicellular organisms to a collective system of government, and the government's been in charge so long that they've got protesters.
From what we can tell, they're yelling something about it being wrong to go to war with the organisms from the nearby stove. Those radical cold-dwelling youth think their elders' plan to conquer the heat-loving organisms from the stove is wrong. Something about freedom and justice for all, no matter what your temperature preference is.
Sad, really. I've let the fridge go for so long that my food has a better governmental system than the one I'm living in out here. Perhaps I should move into my own refrigerator. It would save the problem of figuring out how to paint the master bathroom.
"Not so hard," you say? Surprise! Between ignoring the howls of protest from the felines and the howls of protest coming from the suburban neighborhoods in the fridge, I tiptoed off to Home Despot to purchase sundry goods and items. (I have no idea how the paint chips came home with me, really, Jeff!)
I was lucky today; I found a clueful paint-section employee who reminded me that red paint requires many, many coats to achiveve the desired redness. Supposedly, red paint has a serious transparency issue, and it can take up to five or six coats to achieve the originally-intended color. With a tinted primer coat, rumor has it that only about two coats will be required.
Fewer coats, and that lovely "Cherry Cobbler" color from Behr you were looking at looks like a newly-strangled pink. Not good. Perhaps this guest bathroom project will take a little longer than I originally expected.
Tomorrow: war on all fronts. Down with entropy! Down with autocratic systems of refrigerator government! Up with figuring out how to paint behind toilets! Up with making the cats accept their new room! Up with scrubbing all the blue out of the crevices of my nails!
Well, a girl can hope, anyway.
]]>Current music: Voltaire, "Sexy Data Tango." Its tone explains much about this post. If you want to hear it for yourself, go to voltaire.net. Pick 'Banned On Vulcan' from under 'Music,' and scroll down to the bottom of the page. Grab your own copy there. Not for those incapable of laughing at Star Trek or those under 18. Offer void in some areas. Check your warranty for details.
No, I'm not above riffing on Jonatha Brooke's song titles for entry titles. I have no idea why you'd think otherwise!