Thursday, June 08, 2006

A View Of The TEM Dripping In Latex

I took the Friday before Memorial Day and the week after off to begin a task I've been putting off for over a decade. I began painting my house.

Day 1 Of The TEM Painting (Re-Enactment)

So far, I've got 2/3 of the work done. My bathroom is a really cool peach/pink/shrimp color depending upon what type of light hits it. My main hallway is a melon color. My living room is a very nice salmon/orange/melon color, again depending upon the type of light in the room. I also bought a nice floral rug, a foor lamp with a rouge red lampshade, and a rouge red slipcover for the sofa that I'm nowhere near ready to replace to round out the room. Next up is draperies or bamboo roman shades for the windows to replace the tired old mini blinds. My house is beginning to look like a home.

I still have a lot to do. The dining room needs to be scraped of decades old flocked wallpaper and repainted - a task that I'm beginning to take on and hope to have completed around Labor Day. My bedroom, sewing room, and den need to be painted. Fortunately those rooms, like my hallway, will be quick tasks because there's paneling on the walls. All they'll need is paint on the windows, ceiling, and trim.

Then there's the kitchen or, as I like to call it, the spirit killer. I may just buy a door, close it, and pretend it doesn't exist.

More on the kitchen in a later post. It's making me depressed just thinking about it.

Anyway, I learned quite a bit during the initial go around, and I thought I'd share my newly found wisdom with you. Here are the top 10 things I learned about painting:

1) Some say painting is relaxing. They're wrong. Painting sucks - especially if you have an old house with plaster, weird nooks and crannies, and moulding up the yin-yang.
2) There's only one thing that sucks more than painting - paint swatches. Whoever came up with the idea that a 2"x 2" square of paper as a reflection of what your final color will look like on a wall must've been sniffing an awful lot of paint thinner.
3) Cats will not go near paint until you've painted a windowsill and open the window to help speed the drying process. I love my two, but it's a minor miracle they didn't end up with a melon colored stripe on their tummies.
4) You know that saying about how something can be as dull as watching paint dry? The reference is clearly about daytime television. Between the soaps, endless "Law & Order" reruns, mind-numbing talk shows and court shows (how many times can Maury Povich do a DNA paternity test show, anyway), I thought I would go insane. I knew I was going to the dark side when I found myself looking forward to Tyra Banks in the morning. To her credit, her show does have a really nice theme song by India.Arie.
5) If you take time off from work, no matter how many things you do and steps you take, you will get a call from someone on your job asking you how to do something. Thank goodness I thought ahead and turned off my cell phone.
6) Speaking of turning off the cell phone, it's very easy to get used to being offline and unplugged. No e-mail, no voice mail, no virtual meetings? Now that's paradise. I just remembered to turn my cell phone back on today. Sigh. Vacation is truly over.
7) If you are painting, you will never have enough paint to finish your job. NEVER. I had to make three trips to Lowes for paint. Expensive ass paint.


There's no such thing as a bottomless paint can.

Which reminds me...


8) ...You also will spend more on your project than you plan. Accept it. Deal with it. Get used to it. I planned on painting my three (okay 2.5) rooms for under $100. Wasn't that naivete cute?
9) Paint gets into every possible nook, cranny, and unmentionable inch of exposed skin.


A View Of The TEM After A Week Of Painting


It, however, will never go entirely into corners and on to plaster mouldings, even if you buy those special corner tools and fancy-schmancy paint brushes.


Piece. Of. Crap.


10) In the course of painting, you will break something of value in your home. I popped the seal on the friggin' drain pipe under my bathroom sink. It has to be repaired. Again. Damn it.

Redecorating. Will it ever end?

More to come later.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

hey i really like and identified
with your photo of day one.

9:05 AM  
Blogger TEM said...

That reminds me of the 11th thing I learned: Whenever possible, pay someone to paint for you.

11:31 PM  

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