Paint-a-thon

The many tendrils of my work on the rehab house are bearing fruit.  Yesterday I spent a marathon day out there painting.  My intended goal was to put a coat of paint on the cabinet doors as I want to get these doors on the kitchen cabinets this weekend.  I also wanted to get a second coat of paint on the downstairs bathroom wall and paint the trim in that room.  I'm want to get individual rooms finished, rather than have an ever-threatening,  Damoclesean barrage of unfinished 'stuff'.

I did get the second coat of paint on the downstairs bathroom walls and the trim on the two door frames (door/closet).  The bathroom looks transformed.  And...the colors look terrific with the shower curtain that my daughter was keying the colors from.  The curtain had a melange of colors that defied easy color choices:  silver, dark amber, pale pink/peachish type of color.  After much time and agony, we found what we thought would work. It did...and beautifully.

Who would have thought that picking color choices would cause so much angst.  Outside of stepping out in front of a car or off a cliff, there are few things in our lives on which we decide that are permanent.  What if we go to the wrong college, pick the wrong career, hair color, eye shadow or spouse?  Well, the latter should be permanent, but we live in a time where even that it changeable.

Tomorrow will be my 29th wedding anniversary.  We both wonder how we made it so long.  We've out-married all of our friends who had opinions on the longevity of our marriage.  One of my favorite books is Endurance about Shackleton's great, failed exploration of the South Pole. Yes, there can be greatness in failure!  You simply take a situation that has to be endured, meet the obstacles that get hurled at you, and ultimately and rescue it. My own marriage was a failure for a few years, but we both endured it, and ultimately rescued ourselves and our marriage.  None of that applies to relationships of physical/verbal/psychological abuse.  You just get the hell out of Dodge in those instances.

I surely believe that whatever we think is wrong with our relationships ultimately hinges on us--not them.  I heard a wonderful tape with Joseph Campbell who talked about this concept of compassion in relationships and the notion that our thoughts about the other person's behavior had more to do with our reactions/judgments of that behavior.  Best to navel gaze on why we have those reactions/judgments.  It really was a grand concept that was singularly helpful to me.

What does any of 'this' have to do with picking colors?  Nothing.  But this @#%!#$^% house is like Endurance...I'm going to endure, survive and rescue it!  Hah!

So with the bathroom close to completion, I moved to the cabinet that was laying in the great room along with the upstairs bathroom cabinet.   I put a final coat of paint on that but simply forgot to do the cabinet doors while I had my trim color deployed.  As color choice confirmation was positive in the bathrooms (as it had been in the two bedrooms), I had a very large color choice looming.  Hawthorne Yellow is a lovely Benjamin Moore color which is the focal point of the downstairs.  I elected to put this curiosity (fear?) to rest.  I know what Chantilly Lace looks like on the cabinets.  I do NOT know (exactly) how the Hawthorne Yellow is going to look.

I blew off the cabinets in favor of opening the Hawthorne Yellow Aura Paint.  Painting is the prerequisite for laying the floors.  My getting the upstairs hall painted means that we can begin laying the floors upstairs.  My (lack of) mastery in containing drips of paint is evident everywhere on the subfloor.  Popping that gallon can kept me busy for the balance of the day.  The hall had lots of cut.  Unfortunately there are two door frames just close enough together to prevent painting the wall but showing the existing color.  We will likely have to pop off one of the frames to fix that.

My curiosity was satisfied and that small, niggling fear abated.  The color was stupendously beautiful and looked terrific with the Chantilly Lace.  I finished the hall, and then moved downstairs.  I was determined to NOT re-lid that paint can.  I made sufficient progress to see expanses of yellow that hid the old color and the white patch splotches (of which there were many).  Visual continuity of color does much for the view.  I guess that is why they have high-hide makeup for women. 

My daughter came by and brought me some dinner and helped me with cleanup.  I had elected to use a roller pan rather than a bucket with a screen.  I'll not do that again.  A bucket with a screen is far more stable and cleaner to work with than a roller pan.  My Pelican Bucket continues to be a valued painting partner!  I love this this tool.  I have also been careful with my brushes, and have kept them in almost like new condition.  The Zinnser B-I-N calls for ammonia + water for cleanup.  I find this a helpful combination for latex paint too.  It seems to dislodge paint easily.

My daughter loved the yellow--she, too, was harboring a little bit of angst on the color choices.  No longer did it feel like a blind date where everything sounded so promising from our research.  Actually popping the lid and laying the paint on the well confirmed everything that we though.  She has had a little bit harder time visualizing the outcome--and at one point was a overwhelmed.  She wanted a light colored floor (maple), but I found a darker colored floor in a much higher quality and about the same price point.  Though we discussed it, when the floor came in and she saw how dark it was, she was disappointed.

Yesterday, she realized that with our color choices, the floor is going to enhance her colors--whereas a lighter colored floor would just seem washed out.  Putting the gunstock brown floor against the yellow walls was a great visualization of what the finished product will look like.  The transformation of the floor from expanses of subflooring in "not so great a shape" to a harmonic visual of  beautiful flooring is something that I'm looking forward to seeing.