If You Give a Pig a Paintbrush….

Denise
[Warning: While trying to be slightly entertaining, this post is really to answer the “Hey, Babe, when did we last fix ____?” questions that will arise in about 2025.]

Hopefully you have had the pleasure of reading Laura Numeroff’s picture book, but basically all of them are about how one idea leads to another, exhausting, idea.  

We had our own pancake moment as we tried to do lots of tiny things to the house to get ready for another family to live in it while we traveled, and the momentum grew as our plans got canceled and we were forced to stay home exponentially more than we planned. 
It really started when Dwayne thought we should really fix the peeling ceiling in our shower.  Of the 3 showers in the house, the kids prefer ours, and occasionally one of them feels the need to spray the entire shower with water.  For the second time in ten years, I scraped, mudded, textured, primed, and repainted the ceiling.  And that is almost impossible to do without also doing some of the wall.  So I repainted the bathroom, walls, trim, and door.  And no reason to put up the ugly wicker shelf that I got used twenty years ago–the only thing holding it together was dust and cobwebs, so we bought a new cabinet.  And shower head (incapable of spraying the ceiling). And faucet. And non-rusty caddy. A good scrubbing, and the bathroom was done, just as the kids were entering their second full stay-at-home week.  

I already had the paint can out, and decide that I could openly be appalled by the upstairs hallway (read: Wes’s and Piper’s bedrooms doors).  So we painted those.  If it were easy, I could end this more quickly, but after Piper and I scrubbed and scrapped the front of her door, I looked at the back.  An army of Not Me’s had been busily at work, punching holes into it.  There was not enough putty or patience.  So Dwayne and I bought a new door, which of course, was 1/8″ too wide and didn’t have cutouts for embedded hinges.  I did the heavy lifting and Dwayne did the technical work, and we got the new door on.  I painted all the doors and trim work while Dwayne put on new (oil-rubbed bronze, my favorite) knobs on.  So the hallway was done.


(And just because I love it, I’m sharing my Wall of Christmas Cards.  When I’m in a funk, relive our childful lives and appreciate the evolution of both my kids and my creativity!)
But now Piper’s doorway looked so nice but her room looked like this:

Honestly, her room has bothered me for years and so we came to an agreement.  She wanted to get rid of the wardrobes, get a smaller dresser, and paint the room purple.  To make that happen, she had to shed a lot of crap.  If she could do that, we would find a craigslist dresser of her choice, paint the room together, and Dwayne and I would take out the wardrobes–its own Herculean task.  


This is what the living room looked like with all her crap stored there while we painted.

A little glimpse of the “before and during”:

 


I will never forget, in spite of my best efforts, of teaching Piper to paint a room.  (She started by putting paint on the roller, using her hand a spatula.)  But she looked so darn cute wearing a set of my paint clothes!

We started Wednesday removing the wardrobe, and by Friday night, the room was put back, carpet shampooed, and touch ups completed.  She loves it, and I really appreciate how much less stuff she kept.  In fact, along with the wardrobe, we were able to deliver her outgrown toys and art supplies and dresses to a single mother with foster kids, in addition to the Ikea wardrobe we no longer needed.  

It still needs a new set of curtains, but we’re close to the final touches.  


That project pretty much used up my project energy, but Dwayne still had a little more.  The gaps in our beautiful kitchen floor are a results of not doing the entire upstairs remodel at one time, and needing to use click-in planks instead of glue-down–and of course, of actually using the kitchen.  No other place gets that much foot traffic, and a board in every row was gapping significantly.


Of course, this time it wasn’t as easy to just take off the trip closest to the gap and crowbar it into place, as the flooring went under the very intractable pantry.  After some head-scratching, Dwayne thought using friction, a large mallet, and his foot to close the gap one plank at a time over about 20 feet of flooring.  But nothing he tried held well enough. Finally, he turned to his friend, Bing, and found that others had used double-sided sticky tape.  Eureka!  While I was shampooing carpets (because the shampooer was out, and that pig still had that darn pancake), he fixed the floors and knows how to do it in another few years when they spread out again.  


I think we’ve satisfied that pig for a while.  However, if we come out of this stay-at-home without a cleaner, more organized home (and garage!), I will consider this time wasted.  

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