Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Day one of painting the hall bath...

How did I go the whole weekend and not post a thing? I don't know and I can't even remember what we did this weekend... oh... I remember now - Tim and I went out on Saturday night. We went to this Chinese/Asian buffet. I liked it, but he wasn't as happy. It took forever to get them to put crab legs on the buffet. I loved it because we were there for a long time and nobody called me MOMMA the entire time I was away. It was like heaven. We left there and decided to run by Walmart. Wow... what an impressing date, you say? I wanted to go there. I wanted to pick up some things so I could start painting the bathroom this week. You know, drop cloths, brushes, square painty thingies, etc. We also desperately needed Life cereal. We got a movie and headed for home. It was a nice date. So, back to my title. Today, I decided to tackle the hall bath. I went in last night and decided we would need to replace the towel bars. I thought that would make it easier to paint since I wouldn't have to tape them up. I got up this morning and did 4 loads of laundry, ran to the store, cleaned up, did school and THEN it was time - time to work on the bathroom. Here was my first mistake. I took a handheld screwdriver to remove the towel bars and rings. I am twisting and twisting and twisting and well you get the idea. Okay, I head back to get the drill. It works wonders on ONE screw and then the battery dies. That always happens. We have two batteries. You would think we could keep one charged at all times, but we never do. Plan B - pop the battery into the charger and go do some history read alouds for Savannah. With a charged battery, I tackle this again. Most of the screws come out with no problem, but there are two that are a pain. I get one of those two out and decide to focus on taking the towel bar down now. Yes, the screws are out, but it is stuck to the wall like glue. I took my utility knife and scored the edges. One bar came down. The other would not be so nice. I got a plain old, flat NON-SHARP butter knife. I wanted to slide it down the back and get leverage. It slipped and I SLICED my hand with a BUTTER KNIFE!!! I mean really sliced! It is deep and it scared the heck out of me. Breathing and breathing and whining I ran into the kitchen for a bandage. Got it on and had a piece of chocolate because at this point I NEEDED that darn piece of chocolate. I now contemplated leaving this battle for Tim to wage. He would certainly come right in and pop the darn thing off the wall with no problem. But... I couldn't. I was determined this was my project. He has so many things to do around here that I can't do for one reason or another. I could do this and I was going to do this... even if I did mame myself with a butter knife. Bandage on, chocolate eaten, I went back to the war. I finally got the second towel bar off along with quite a bit of drywall. HORROR!!! If Tim saw this, he would not be happy. Panic!!! What to do? Mud stuff - we must have some somewhere. He always has that kind of stuff somewhere, right? Sure enough - I found a big bucket of it. I took that flat tool thingie and smoothed it on. Whew... it worked. Okay, there is one circle towel bar left. It has a stripped screw. I pulled and pulled and pulled and finally the bar came down but left the screw. Who put these things up and did they mean for us to hang from our toes on them everyday? Back to the garage for those locking plier thingies. I begin to twist and twist and twist and you get the idea. Success! All I really wanted to do today was tape up the bathroom, take the towel bars off and prime. I had to prime because of the faux finish already there. The prep took way longer than I thought and honestly I thought about putting my feet up and watching Oprah at this point. I didn't do it though. I kept going. Got the primer going and finished one coat - except where the mud has to dry. Did I mention I made homemade lasagna during all of this. Okay, okay, it was homemade awhile back and we froze them. Thank God for those types of things in the freezer or I think I would have cried when it was time to make dinner. We ate, Tim took Sebastian outside on the porch swing and I went back to do another coat of prime. The end of day one. You know after looking at the pictures I took - I didn't think the BEFORE bathroom pictures looked half bad, but the paint really was dingy. It has been 7 years since we painted in there. The after looks, well, like PRIMER. I sure hope it looks better with paint and finished. Stay tuned...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

;-) Okay.... can we say over-achiever? LOL! That was a lot of work for just one day!!!

Anonymous said...

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention... From a professional painter those kind of set backs in prepping are par for the course! It just means your final job will look that much nicer.