Friday, August 1, 2008

Seeing Red

Every summer, it's normal for me to paint a room in this house. I've run out of rooms that don't require scaffolding, so I'm in a holding pattern this summer, but Honey Pie (Alice) inspired me to write about painting when she wrote a post about painting her son's bedroom. This particular line (about getting sick of the job) cracked me up:

"By the time I actually got to the walls, I was consciously painting over spiderwebs and smallish insects in the quest to be done."

My name's Barb, and I'm a bug-painter-over, too. (Not often, but I must confess!)


Alice also wrote about the idiocy of painting anything red. Remember my master bath photo from this post; the bathroom with the cranberry-colored walls?
It's evidence that I, too, failed to figure out the folly of my idea until it was too late. First of all, I fell for the "Pink primer will alleviate the need for extra coats," line. Yeah, right. As I recall, this job took three coats in addition to the primer, but add to that the insane idea to use SAND paint, and you have a bathroom that will be painted again only over my dead body.

The job has some charming memories for me, though; like the time I fell off the ladder, tearing a shoulder muscle and scraping a 5-inch wide, sandy-painted path off the wall. In spite of my best efforts to "patch" it (left-handed), the evidence is still there for you to notice, if you bother to close the door. I also remember my desperate (successful) search for Wite-out, to cover up the mistakes where the cranberry smeared onto the white ceiling; definitely happy about that brainstorm.

A part of me chuckles when I think of the people who buy this house from us one day, loving the bathroom color, but tiring of it too late to realize that it has SAND in the paint and will likely require 45 coats of any other color to hide the red undertones (after the sandblasting). There's no getting around that.

So, you can bet that instead of showing off the bathroom during Open House tours, I'll highlight the fantastic closet that it leads to!

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