Painting was intended for people of sturdy emotional stock. How else can you explain away the unholy tendency of a material designed solely to please the eye which is represented in one color, is applied in another color and dries in a third? This says nothing of the swirls and the splotches and the missed spots.
The Yankee, my lovely bride, is convinced she loves painting. I know exactly where I come down on this particular skill and it is somewhere around the level of “Glad I’m not a carpenter.” She says she loves to paint, but her frustration would suggest otherwise. Last night she tried to paint part of the master bedroom, but the color of blue-hued blueness that Lowe’s offered was too blue. So this morning we visited again. The paint clerk immediately realized the error, acknowledged that there was no amount of water and milk dilution that was going to lighten this shade of pigment enough to our wishes and granted our money back on non-refundable paint.
So we visited Sherwin-Williams, where the cost is a bit higher, but they are ready to cover the earth, a bit of propaganda which no doubt irritates the green customers and the Earth Day types. (There was a splinter between them in 2003, they split into two factions, look it up.)
So we bought more paint for the bedroom and the proper paint for the library and the dining room. Lowe’s did not have the equivalent, so we picked it up from the place that gave us the handy online tool. The Yankee has been playing with it for days. You upload a picture, you highlight the wall portions (thereby protecting the furniture) and click a color on the wheel. You see a preview, the page gives you the name of a color and so on.
So it is like Photoshop? I asked.
“But with paint!”
Clearly she was in her element.
So we started painting again. The bedroom, which was an experience determined to wound the psyche. A now lighter color was painted over the darker color. The lighter color exhibited peculiar tendencies while drying. We considered hiring a painter. Fortunately for the wallet everyone was booked.
She moved on to the kitchen and the library. Having by this time finished with the ceiling fans project. I picked up our termite bond. I’d risked life and limb and probably several safety codes by standing on the very top of my borrowed ladder in my brand new home to tape off molding. I’d had the idea to invent tape smart enough to not stick to itself and generally done everything else I could to avoid painting. So, I began painting around the baseboards, windows and fireplace.
The kitchen went from a Barney purple and the future library went from a pale gold to a slate green. It matches the curtains. Incredibly, it also matches the color of the font on our family fireplace crock that we received as a Christmas present last year. I wonder if she’s noticed that yet. The bedroom, meanwhile, had dried to just the shade for which we’d hoped. Painting with your fingers crossed sometimes works in your favor, though you tend to drip paint in odd places.
We had dinner, and the romance of new home life continued. What we made for dinner tonight called for a can of tomatoes. Of all of the things my thoughtful, prepared and intelligent bride brought with us this trip the one thing she did not consider was a can opener. (I don’t say this to blame her, merely to point out that she’d packed everything else we could possibly need.)
So I opened the tomatoes the old fashioned way: with a hammer and screwdriver.
After dinner we painted some more. The dining room. Note the excellent tape work done way up high. I climbed up there for that. She climbed back up to paint it. We are painting in “fired brick” which makes my hands look like a bloodied violent offender who has yet to clean up the evidence. We’ll have to do another coat there tomorrow.
Even still, we painted four rooms today, I painted parts of three of them. I managed to get only one bit of it on my clothes, one tiny little speck of green slate on a bright blue, old KARN 920 shirt; no biggie.
Which, wow, provides a moment of clarity. That job was eight years ago. And this realization right after saying aloud “You know, we should be celebrating (or not) our 15th high school reunion this year.”
Time flies when you’re mixing paint.
