My goal of completing this home improvement project in time to host Thanksgiving dinner? Not gonna make it. We had to make a couple of phone calls to our friends, cancelling Thanksgiving. We�ll still have a little dinner here, for just the three of us, but our house will be in no condition to receive visitors.
We�ve run into a few snags. The first, and most predictable, was my inability to maintain my momentum. Doing all this in my �spare� time has simply worn me out. A couple of days this past week, I�ve gotten home from work fully intending to spend a couple of hours painting, only to find myself sprawled out on the couch napping. It took me two full days just to paint one wall in my living room. A half wall, at that. But yesterday I made up for it by finishing the living room and dining room. Well, almost finished. I have to put the second coat on half of it, and then do the touch up painting, which will take a long time, since our walls are heavily texturized, and to date I have found no masking tape that will entirely prevent leak-through and create a perfectly straight line. Hence the touch up.
Plus, there�s some phenomenon that occurs in which my body exhibits some sort of spastic response to holding a roller fully loaded with paint. This response causes me to �reach out and touch� the ceiling with the roller, no matter how careful I�m trying to be. It�s like I have no control of my own body movements, creating the need for even more touch up painting. And I�m not the only one this happens to. I witnessed the very same phenomenon affecting P. One minute he�s painting away, rolling up and down, careful to avoid anything beyond the taped borders. The next minute, his painting arm has been abducted by unseen forces and is going just everywhere! Past the tape, onto the ceiling. And we�re both helpless to stop it! Afterward, we just look at each other, and say, f---, what was that? It happens every time we paint.
The second thing slowing down our progress has been my need to clean everything as we go. I took all the curtains down, hardware, etc., spackled the holes, and of course I noticed all the windows needed cleaning. Sills too. And you can�t paint if there�s dust or cobwebs or whatever, so lots of dusting and wiping. We may not ever get this project completed, but our house is a whole lot cleaner.
There are walls on this level of the house that still need fresh paint. We didn�t think they would, but after seeing how fresh and smart everything looks with new paint, it�s painfully obvious that we need to paint the stairwells going both up and down. But I told P last night that we�ll have to do that another time. We can�t just keep painting. We have to move on!
Today, after I finish the second coat and all touch up painting is done (slow and tedious work, since I have to use an artist�s brush around the entire perimeter of the room), we are going to take measurements to see how level our floors are. We are being optimistic. Since this construction is only 5 years old, we�re hoping there isn�t enough variance in the subfloor to prevent us from laying our new floor. If there is, and there may very well be, we�ll have to get some leveling compound and prepare the subfloor. We didn�t think we�d have to do this, but we might. If this is the case, our project will be delayed even more. And I might cry.
If it all becomes just too much, I am prepared to suggest we bite the bullet and pay the $2,000 it would cost for somebody to come in and lay the floor for us. I don�t want to do that, as I am convinced this project is not beyond the scope of our abilities, but truthfully, I�m getting tired of living in a construction zone.
P keeps saying, �Keep your eye on the prize. It will all be worth it when it�s done.� He�s right, of course. It�s going to be beautiful, like a brand new house, only this time without the fugly carpeting and vinyl. I just hope we survive all of this DIY stuff. It�s not as easy as they make it look on TV.
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