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Tuesday, July 27, 2010

PAINT. A WHOLE new world of lessons



So I'm sure I've told you, many times, I grew up in a log house. So to me, a wall is a wall and when it goes up and it's smooth, it's done! Right? WRONG! You have to prime. You have to put up trim and crown molding (really? why?). You have to choose colors. You have to paint CEILINGS! Who paints ceilings honestly?! They looked perfectly fine to me. Well apparently, this is very important. This is also, where I learned about a little thing called primer which I learned to both simultaneously love/appreciate and LOATHE entirely. Moreover, this is where I accomplished my most frightening task/lesson: painting.

MB took the liberty of priming and painting the ceiling, in the master bedroom only, for me. Thank God. I don't think I could have handled this. But then we took on the task of priming the walls together. At this point the floors were still unfinished so we didn't have to worry too much about getting them covered in paint but we were methodical with our tarps none the less. This was the lesson in home ownership that I was the most excited and frightened about. I had painted furniture. Once. It came out OK.
I dressed myself head to toe for painting. I showed up in the room, on a very hot May day in hospital scrub bottoms (WAY too big), my old white, button up smock from working in the bakery at Market Basket (something that resembles very much a butchers smock and also, far too big) that I had saved for just such an occasion, and a far too large (I have a very small head this is not my fault!) red baseball cap. I thought MB was going to die when he looked at me. Clearly I was overdressed for this excursion and he made me feel rather foolish. His responsibility was to "cut" the paint into the corners and the trim. Mine was to roll. I was terrified to actually do this. MB gave me very specific instructions: "don't roll too fast or it will splash paint, don't let it drip, make sure you can't see lines..." I put the roller to the wall and went about as fast a snail crawls I would say. MB thought this was pretty amusing and told me I could go a bit faster than that. After the first wall I sort of got the hang of things and got more comfortable, learning how to go over the "seams" of the paint and smooth them out. By the time we were done it looked damn good!
MB and I picked out a paint color sort of on a whim on one of our many trips to Home Depot (it was beginning to feel like we lived there). We knew we wanted a sage green. We knew we wanted muted colors, nothing bright. This was by far the most exciting part of this whole experience for me. for YEARS I had begged my mother to let me paint the spaces in between the logs in my room (I got rebellious one day and posted every picture I could find in a few ski magazines and tapped them to the walls in between the logs in my room. This didn't last long.), envied my friend who seemed to paint her room based on her mood that day, and sat quietly (sometimes) simmering over the injustice of being a creative person whose artistic abilities were wasted due to lack of ability to paint. Well we got our praire sage without putting a sample on the wall and MB took the liberty once again, of painting the master bedroom one day when I was gone. It was glorious. I LOVED it! It was also very exciting. You see, we had planned a big housewarming party for the second weekend in June and originally, had thought that was more then plenty of time. Well by now we were three weeks away from the party and not very close to being done. But this was one step closer!
MB's father then showed up like a Springtime Santa Clause late that Sunday with our crown molding. Ooo trim! God it's pretty. We don't have things like trim and wain's coating and bead board and crown molding in a log house. Just logs. Nice and simple and uncomplicated. Well, they put it up and then MB put the two coats of antique white trim paint we had picked out for it. We then, together, him cutting, me following with the roller, finished painting the room and the master bedroom was finally looking like a room. The thing was, there was a LOT more painting to do and I was learning very quickly why I couldn't seem to get anyone to come help me.

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