You know what phrase is beginning to haunt my waking dreams?
“A quick coat of paint.”
There’s this insidious myth that painting is a swift and easy panacea. “Quick lick of paint, she’ll be right.” “Nothing wrong with that house that a quick coat of paint won’t fix.” “Lovely well-made piece, just needs a drop of paint.”
It is LIES. Helpdesk Man, myself and my stalwart younger sister have been painting portions of our new house for three days straight - three rooms, to be precise. None of these rooms is entirely finished. Either we’re doing it horribly, horribly wrong, or Big Pigment has some kind of stranglehold over the media. For the record: painting is a mammoth, horrific undertaking. Perhaps it’s quick compared to putting up wallpaper, a particular form of torture I vaguely remember Mother engaging in during my childhood; but that’s a little like saying World War One was “the nice short one”.
And the indignity of it is, one spends so little time painting. Most of it’s preparation and cleanup - laying drop cloths*, hunting for the masking tape, washing out the rollers - and, in our case, passing back and forth a baby who is beaming and contented, but nevertheless undeniably there. Naturally it is important to mask one’s windowsills off accurately, but I always feel a bit impatient with the non-roller-wielding parts; just as I get peeved with the non-stitching parts of sewing (ie. the vast majority), and the non-seed-planting parts of gardening (also the vast majority).
Anyway, it is Getting There. The kitchen is a vaguely French dull yellow, of which Helpdesk Man and I are very proud because we conquered much Aspieness in choosing it. The living room is cream with a feature wall in a kind of purply blue, which we’re not entirely sure about, but it is a vast improvement on the previous hue - a rather lurid green which at the time of writing is still present on the skirting boards, shocking us whenever we look at it. Then the pig’s room is cream as well, with a dusky pink for the wardrobe doors and - thank you, Pinterest - wide vertical stripes on one wall. These are pretty neat, even though I was envisaging a sort of muted, dusky Victorian look and instead got an aggressively cheerful candy shop. Still, we feel skilly, and our enthusiasm was only slightly dampened when the landlord, upon being asked for his opinion of our colour scheme, grunted “Oh well, you’re the ones who’ll have to live with it.” (Well, my enthusiasm was slightly dampened. Helpdesk Man suffers from very little self-doubt, and immediately concluded that said landlord must be colour-blind.)
Oh, smeg. It is nearly midnight. I have to get up early tomorrow to paint again while the chaps load up the truck. My clothes aren’t packed. There is undoubtedly some awful evidence of my slovenly housekeeping hiding behind the fridge or under the couch, ready to shock the nice man from church who offered to help us move. I packed the peanut butter and can’t find it. One of my hand-written cookbooks is missing. The Christmas tree is still standing, half-decorated, in the corner of the lounge. I am covered in paint, but don’t know where the towels are. The freezer is defrosting itself all over the kitchen floor, because I couldn’t face it. Two of our ex-flatmate’s socks were welded to the bathroom floor behind the washing machine. Helpdesk Man hasn’t even started packing up his office.
I am going to bed.
*Helpdesk Man insisted on calling them “throw rugs” for a while; now he’s taken to calling them “drop bears”. They all have holes in strategic places.
AprilElf Says:
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