I'm assembling projects for 2024, as if there's not enough to do already. When I still had a thyroid, I never anticipated that just hauling in groceries for two people and fixing my hair would become such chores. I have two buckets of paint staring me in the face, something I should have never bought. I like to purchase those little paint samples at Lowes and Home Depot, slather them onto foam boards and then stare at the ideas until something strikes me. This causes us a lot of problems.
It started with the fact that I mostly live in our study. It is a gorgeous room, in our old Victorian house. When we first bought this place, in 2012, Ken found a huge, ancient painting in the barn. It's a mystery -- a picture of several old men gathered around a stove at a feed store or something. We stuck it above the mantle in that room, before I decided on colors. Ken decided he wanted everything to match that painting, to feel like a man cave in there -- with textured, suede-colored walls and leather chairs. Clubby, sophisticated. That room was the worst one in the whole house. There was old wallpaper hanging from the ceiling and walls. Liz and I started scraping. We dogged it for a month, making some headway, but that stuff was not yielding much. One morning, I decided to prime everything with B-I-N primer, the Mack-Daddy of primers. It's oil-based, heady stuff. We got up on scaffolding and worked all day, painting and covering up all the nasties that were left from all that scraping. Ken arrived home, hollering something about why didn't we open the house up while we were exposing ourselves to toxic fumes. Liz and I were singing and basically hanging from the rafters, oblivious to the fact that the Elvis who was singing with us was not real. A massive headache took over my brain and I think Liz might have eventually succumbed to the porcelain. I recall doing many such events way back when I was pregnant with my various children. The grandmas would worry about the ladders, the heights, all the drama. I should have listened. One child has Aspergers, one is dyslexic, they all have ADD and one's a firefighter. What was I thinking?
Either way, eventually I did a gorgeous, velvety suede finish on the walls. Sherwin Williams Portobello. Yep, looks like a mushroom. Ken built a whole wall of beautiful bookcases to house some of my books and I painted them SW Turkish Coffee. The room is warm and enveloping, a place you might go to smoke cigars or swill brandy. But we don't do that in there. It's my office where I work and practice my music. That's all well and good, except for the fact that when winter comes I get really sad about all the darkness. I scoured thrift stores and yard sales, coming up with amazing, Victorian-styled lighting. Lots of it. Doesn't help. The walls are sucking all the light into their vortex. It's a near miracle that this room has stayed the same color for a decade. I'm like the Navy -- if it's sitting still, it's time to paint it. I got on Pinterest and started perusing colors. I laid out a paint fan (I only own four or five of them, having begged them off of gullible people at the paint stores)...and then proceeded to buy about a dozen samples. God really intended me to live in a beach house, He did. When given the chance, I revert to colors that have something to do with water. There's a big blue-green sample that's been floating on my mantle for some time. And one day, at a weak moment in Home Depot, I went ahead and bought two gallons of the goody. If we hadn't had to rip a whole rotten floor out of the nursery and change-up all the holiday magic this year, I'd have had it painted by now. Problem is, I've had too long to stare at it. I think if I go ahead and do it, I'm going to end up re-doing it, another problem that my poor husband has had to contend with these 41+ years. He never yells about it...he really never complains much, just laughs and shakes his head.
Meanwhile, the Amazon boxes are piling up, Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat. Will I waste two gallons of paint, again? Only the shadow knows for sure...
No comments:
Post a Comment