This morning Iain and I spent 15 minutes looking for my mixing bowl so I could make breakfast before Elijah pointed out that I brought lunch to the new house in it over the weekend.  These days it doesn’t matter what house I’m in, whatever I need is invariably at the other one.

We’re coming off of a long weekend of work and gearing up for yet another one.  We’re all pretty beat.  It got to the point recently where I was prying a baseboard off the wall, noticed blood staining said wall, figured it was probably mine, but was too tired to tell where it was coming from, or to care.  (I’m perfectly fine, I must have cut my finger on something at some point without noticing)

We’re encountering all the usual remodeling successes and mishaps, in our own original way.  Though some days it seems to lean more towards the latter.

Going two weeks back, I spent the weekend painting all of the trim boards in all of the bedrooms.  As I was on the floor painstakingly touching up the baseboard in the boys room, after we had finally finished with the walls, I started to think.  You see all of the carpeting in the second floor has been torn out, nasty, toxic stuff that it is.  The plan was to put in wood flooring sometime in the foreseeable, but not immediate future.  So two full days into trim painting it finally dawns on me that we’re going to want to rip off the baseboards before we install the floors.  duh.  And goodness knows we’ll probably scratch up our nice, freshly painted walls in the process.  right.  Clearly there will be some deconstruction followed by more painting in my future.  And those floors are coming sooner, rather then later.

I don’t mind painting really.  Though this is my first experience with this kind of marathon painting where we are trying to paint several rooms at once in a short period of time, and I can see where that could start to wear a person down.  But in general I don’t mind it, so long as I am using a paint that doesn’t make me feel ill.  I don’t like painting ceilings.  I’m not built for it.  Steve says things like, “oh, we could bang this ceiling out in half an hour.”  No, you and your long arms could.  I would spend at least that long just moving the ladder around.  And I hate washing brushes.

I don’t mind washing dishes.  I kind of like washing laundry (have you heard that they have these newfangled machines that basically do the work for you?  What’s not to like about that?!?).  I hate washing brushes.  If someone out there has some fabulous, chemical free way of getting paint off of rollers and brushes, I’m all ears.  Because scolding hot water, breaking my nails trying to scrape the bits of paint and wearing the skin off my hands is really not my idea of a good time.  I’m thinking there must be a system or method I’m unaware of.  I used to hate washing dishes too until I discovered a system that works for me and now it doesn’t bother me in the least.

This weekend I painted our bedroom.  I’m horrible at picking paint colors.  I know exactly what I want in my head and have no earthly clue how to make that translate to paint on a wall.  I’m further impaired at the moment by my paint of choice being sold on-line and not actually having samples to fool with.  I ordered a color and thought I would end up mixing it with another color that I already had to get the shade I was looking for.  The paint came and we liked it.  I put it on the wall and we liked it.  It dried and became much darker and I still liked it, but it really wasn’t what I was going for.  And yet I kept painting.  Steve popped in to ask how things where going.  I told him that it was kind of dark, and I wasn’t sure that it was the color I wanted.  He, reasonably enough, asked why I was continuing to paint.  I had no real good answer to that, other then that I truly did like the color and I was having an internal debate about whether or not I could let my original vision for the room go.  My inclination for most of the day being that I could, or at least should.  I was already so far.  There were so many other things to move on to.  And then sometime in the middle of the night, while everyone else was sleeping and there was only maybe a third of the ceiling left, I decided the I didn’t want to let that vision go, so I put my paint and rollers away and the next morning I mixed up a new batch of paint and started all over again.  As penance for my indecisiveness, I now have to paint the ceiling again and wash brushes twice as many times.  All I can say is this better turn out well!

Lest you think that things are all going poorly, we do have one room done, and we all love it.  Two more are quite close.  And I got to order fruit trees today, which makes everything in life seem swell.