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August 07, 2006

Painting Phase II

I decided I must seriously dedicate myself to the task of painting before mom and dad returned. Having a more finished look than just wallboard, I figured, would make all the difference. With a newfound zeal and an 8-foot ladder, I applied myself to applying paint.

First, the undercoat. I believe it is called PVA primer & sealer. The guy at Home Depot had made a special point of telling us to just "slop it on" and not to worry about how bad it looks. But damn, it looked bad. Really, really bad. I spent a good long time ignoring what the guy at Home Depot had said, and painted and repainted the section I was working on, which happened to be the ceiling. If you don't know this already, painting the ceiling sucks. And painting it again and again while ignoring what the guy at Home Depot had said really sucks, especially when you get a call later on telling you to stop being anal and just do what the guy at Home Depot had said. Thanks, Matthew. And thanks for seconding him, Jose.

Aside from that, though, do you have any idea how hard it is to take a picture of yourself painting the ceiling from atop an 8-foot ladder? Now you do: whicked hard. I consider myself a pro, so don't try this at home.

Of course, as is always the case, as soon as I got done doing all the really tedious work, like putting on this horrible-looking primer, Matthew rolls into town and gets to do the fun stuff. Or, the stuff that makes it look like he's getting way more accomplished than I am. We picked a soft yellow called "Provence Cream" that I think we also used in our kitchen in B-more. It sure looked yellow coming out of the bucket and going onto the primer. But we had noticed last time that once all of the walls were the same color, it stopped looking quite so yellow. So, we're keeping our fingers crossed. But it sure does look tasty. I could drink it right up, like french vanilla ice cream.

While we were painting, a butterfly came in and fluttered around. I was delighted because it almost perfectly matched our buttery walls (not in the photo so much, but in real life a lot more) (for you color-matching fiends out there). Matthew was too furiously painting to appreciate the coincidence.

As I mentioned before, I usually get to do the slow tedious stuff. This is the sort of slow tedious stuff I'm talking about:

... painting carefully along the edges and making sure none spills on the beams etc. It turns out that even though I'm pretty anal about art/design projects and the like, I really stink at painting. I spilled a lot, and generally did a not-very-bang-up job (unless, is a bang-up job a bad thing...?). Anyway, all this concentrating on not spilling the paint, not putting too much paint on, painting inside the lines, not dropping my paintbrush on the dirty floor, not falling off the ladder was very exhausting. When it was all over, I was pretty darn tired.

Iggy also found the process extremely dull.

And that was just the first coat. But, it doesn't look too bad, now, does it?


Posted by ribbu at August 7, 2006 05:34 PM