I'm a Big Whining Baby (Part I)
I do not want to see another paint brush, can of paint, drop cloth, stepladder, or--most especially--any rolls of blue painters' tape until the year 2015--at the earliest.
There are two reasons for this: The first reason is that I spent nearly every spare moment last February attempting to paint our spare bedroom with one of those faux finishes. It was a disaster of Mr. Bean-like proportions.*
The second reason is that I just vaporized most of my three-day weekend painting the bathroom. I shouldn't have had to do this. The paint job in the bathroom was perfectly fine until the guy who fixed our ruined bathroom floor fucked up the paint job in the process. As you can see from the photo, he chipped off just enough paint to make the wall resemble the Men's Room at a Greyhound station. (Note the graffiti-like effect the contractor's penciled measurements give the baseboards.) Perhaps he thought that we had some of the original paint (we don't) and could just do a touch up, but it looks just bad enough that it can't be left as is and the only thing to do is repaint the entire bathroom. Expletive deleted!
As much as I am not cut out by nature to paint, B is even less so. So I couldn't just palm the job off on him. There was no way out for me, but if I was going to have to paint, first I'd have to spend a certain amount of time grousing and whining about how much I didn't want to paint and how trying and tedious it would be.
Sample complaints: "How am I going to paint behind the toilet tank which is less than a 1/2 inch from the wall?" "How will I not slop paint all over the brand-new floor when I paint the trim that is less than a millimeter from the floor?" "I'll have to use a frickin' Prang watercolors paintbrush to do it!" "Why do I have to paint all the baseboards?" "Shouldn't the contractor have done that?"
And the biggest questions of all: "Shouldn't the contractor have repainted the entire bathroom since he ruined the paint job?**
On Friday, after moaning and grousing for, oh, about a month, I told myself I needed to buck up, bite the bullet, face the music, etc., knowing that if I waited much longer, I would reach the point where I would start to ignore the shoddiness, and that, my friends, is the road to Dogpatch--a road I do not want to ever go down.
I started rampaging around the house Friday afternoon trying to locate all the painting supplies I had stocked up on last year. Of course, they were nowhere to be found. Hell! I finally found them out in the garage next to an old cat litter box we are--apparently--keeping so that we can one day bring it to Antiques Road Show and sell it for big bucks. Anyway, I was glad I found the stuff. It would be too painful to have to buy all that painting crap over again.
I got up early on Saturday, figuring I'd get one coat done in a couple of hours. Wrong! It took me a couple of hours just to do all the ding-dong taping. If there is such a thing as hell, and if I am destined to go to hell, and if hell is customized for each individual, I will find myself spending eternity applying painters' tape to inaccessible and/or dangerous places such as the baseboards behind toilets and the ceiling above the shower.
I did one coat on Saturday; one coat on Sunday; and put two coats on the baseboards today (which took forever with that Prang-style paintbrush--just so you know). As the sun went down this evening, I wanted to believe I was done, but I could see that not only were the baseboards going to need a frickin' third coat, I was going to have to paint all the cabinets and drawers, which were now looking like dirty Chicago slush compared with the blinding snow white of the newly painted baseboards. I slapped a very quick first coat on the cabinets and drawers this evening before racing out the door to a PIFF film, finally snatching a few hours of fun out of the wreck of my holiday weekend.
Guess what I'll be doing on my lunch hour tomorrow?
*The origins of my hatred for painting supplies and equipment can be traced to last year’s hellish episode. l’ll write about it in tomorrow’s entry: “I’m a Big Whining Baby (Part II)."
**I haven’t dug out the contract, but there’s probably a clause that says, “Contractor takes no responsibility for fucking up paint job and causing client to sacrifice a three-day weekend to fix said fuck up.” If either B or I had a vertabrae of spine between us, we would have challenged the guy, but we didn’t. Instead we just told him the floor looked great and wrote him a sizeable check.
There are two reasons for this: The first reason is that I spent nearly every spare moment last February attempting to paint our spare bedroom with one of those faux finishes. It was a disaster of Mr. Bean-like proportions.*
The second reason is that I just vaporized most of my three-day weekend painting the bathroom. I shouldn't have had to do this. The paint job in the bathroom was perfectly fine until the guy who fixed our ruined bathroom floor fucked up the paint job in the process. As you can see from the photo, he chipped off just enough paint to make the wall resemble the Men's Room at a Greyhound station. (Note the graffiti-like effect the contractor's penciled measurements give the baseboards.) Perhaps he thought that we had some of the original paint (we don't) and could just do a touch up, but it looks just bad enough that it can't be left as is and the only thing to do is repaint the entire bathroom. Expletive deleted!
As much as I am not cut out by nature to paint, B is even less so. So I couldn't just palm the job off on him. There was no way out for me, but if I was going to have to paint, first I'd have to spend a certain amount of time grousing and whining about how much I didn't want to paint and how trying and tedious it would be.
Sample complaints: "How am I going to paint behind the toilet tank which is less than a 1/2 inch from the wall?" "How will I not slop paint all over the brand-new floor when I paint the trim that is less than a millimeter from the floor?" "I'll have to use a frickin' Prang watercolors paintbrush to do it!" "Why do I have to paint all the baseboards?" "Shouldn't the contractor have done that?"
And the biggest questions of all: "Shouldn't the contractor have repainted the entire bathroom since he ruined the paint job?**
On Friday, after moaning and grousing for, oh, about a month, I told myself I needed to buck up, bite the bullet, face the music, etc., knowing that if I waited much longer, I would reach the point where I would start to ignore the shoddiness, and that, my friends, is the road to Dogpatch--a road I do not want to ever go down.
I started rampaging around the house Friday afternoon trying to locate all the painting supplies I had stocked up on last year. Of course, they were nowhere to be found. Hell! I finally found them out in the garage next to an old cat litter box we are--apparently--keeping so that we can one day bring it to Antiques Road Show and sell it for big bucks. Anyway, I was glad I found the stuff. It would be too painful to have to buy all that painting crap over again.
I got up early on Saturday, figuring I'd get one coat done in a couple of hours. Wrong! It took me a couple of hours just to do all the ding-dong taping. If there is such a thing as hell, and if I am destined to go to hell, and if hell is customized for each individual, I will find myself spending eternity applying painters' tape to inaccessible and/or dangerous places such as the baseboards behind toilets and the ceiling above the shower.
I did one coat on Saturday; one coat on Sunday; and put two coats on the baseboards today (which took forever with that Prang-style paintbrush--just so you know). As the sun went down this evening, I wanted to believe I was done, but I could see that not only were the baseboards going to need a frickin' third coat, I was going to have to paint all the cabinets and drawers, which were now looking like dirty Chicago slush compared with the blinding snow white of the newly painted baseboards. I slapped a very quick first coat on the cabinets and drawers this evening before racing out the door to a PIFF film, finally snatching a few hours of fun out of the wreck of my holiday weekend.
Guess what I'll be doing on my lunch hour tomorrow?
*The origins of my hatred for painting supplies and equipment can be traced to last year’s hellish episode. l’ll write about it in tomorrow’s entry: “I’m a Big Whining Baby (Part II)."
**I haven’t dug out the contract, but there’s probably a clause that says, “Contractor takes no responsibility for fucking up paint job and causing client to sacrifice a three-day weekend to fix said fuck up.” If either B or I had a vertabrae of spine between us, we would have challenged the guy, but we didn’t. Instead we just told him the floor looked great and wrote him a sizeable check.
posted by Rozanne at 12:08 AM
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