When we arrived, her beau was outside sanding baseboard trim. We will re-use what we can, but surely some of it was going to be reluctantly re-installed (read: bust!). As I opened the door, I was greeted by the BIN odor. I could tell by its strength and by the thin film on the paint mixing stick that Hannah had not mixed it up well (new gallon). She was in the other room...I found her with the paint brush and the door with a hundred runs. Had she been murdering someone, I could not have been more horrified (pardon the hyperbole!).
However, she, like me, has never let lack of experience or knowledge get in the way of tackling something. That is not such a bad way to be! After admonishing her for not mixing the paint and for applying it haphazardly, I encouraged her to focus her attention on vacuuming and wiping down the baseboard trim that Brett had been sanding. "I'm tried of sanding, vacuuming and wiping," she complained. I reminded her that these were unavoidable steps--it was her idea to move from stained to painted trim. "Yes, but when you said it had to be sanded, wiped, sanded. . . . . it didn't sound like very much work." Right. I'll take responsibility for understatement, though I thought I made it clear that it would be much work.
Having said that, I wandered upstairs to "feel" my trim after applying the first coat of finish paint. All that sanding and wiping, priming, sanding, wiping was evident. Beautiful and smooth. These are the rooms that we are trying to transform.
I am a reluctant prepper/painter of these windows as they are junk. But, they can replace these windows later--the budget rules decisions now. For now, they are prepped for paint. I've moved from my kitchen cabinet prep to getting the upstairs' bedrooms painted. While there is a piece of me that says it is a crime to paint wood cabinets (and it adds considerably to our work), I realize that the pine look is exceedingly dated. I want to get one room completed to get the energy of harmonic convergence working a little bit better. I do have some of the cabinet interiors primed, and I have a first coat of paint in one cabinet--as well as the same for most of the cabinet face backs. The ones not in such a state of repair happen to be the ones that I took home to prep. I had forgotten about them, and I took them back to the house.
But like Hannah, I am tired of sanding, priming, sanding, vacuuming a wiping. I feel that my fingertips are worn down from feeling the surfaces for sanding imperfections. So putting on some fresh paint is some therapy to see both visually and tactilely the efficacy of such steps to the finished product--and to catch a much needed second wind. The last thing we want to do is to take short cuts to compromise the finished product. We are on a budget for dollars--not for work processes.
It is our work processes that will make our end product look like it was not completed on a budget. That is worth remembering for most tasks in life--cooking, cleaning, accounting, painting, rocket science. Process does matter--and in our impatience to get to the end result, we may find ourselves with an unsatisfactory outcome. If I sound preachy, it is because I suffer from chronic impatience; accordingly, I am preaching to myself as much as anything.
Impatience is NOT productive progress--the act of efficiently completing our work Rather, impatience is the door of a hundred runs. And that door of a hundred runs is a great lesson for my daughter who is fighting mightily in quelling her inherited DNA of impatience. Sandpaper can clear most of those imperfections.
Despite our best planning (looking up the restaurant for Monday hours), failures can occur. The restaurant was closed, so we went to a favorite Mexican restaurant. This project coupled with my birthday is reminding me that dermabrasion might have some merit!
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