golden

Did you notice I was MIA for a little while there? No, I didn't get the shirt done. In fact, I haven't even picked it up since I posted about it. That shirt still looks like an unfinished lab coat with a really tight neck. (I did, at least, rethread the serger - no small task - after one of the threads broke, so that's progress, I suppose.)

I've been knitting some, but it's not really worth showing here since I just made a plain old boring hat and scarf. It's a gift and it's black, so yeah. Boring and secret! I'm planning to do some fun colorwork next, so that should be worth a few pictures, at least, once I get started.

I did, however spend four solid days painting Daniel's room. It was a huge project. I had to paint everything but the floor. (At least, I tried not to spatter the floor, but I wasn't 100% successful.) 

It all started with a set of shelves. If you're a homeowner, and especially if you're a homeowner of a rather old house, you'll understand the domino effect I'm about to explain here. You see, my dad and I built a set of bookshelves to be mounted on the wall of Daniel's room. Let me back up here and say that by "my dad and I" I really mean "my dad" because I'm pretty squeamish when it comes to power tools and he's rather protective, so really what happened is that we picked out the lumber together, he did pretty much all of the work, and I got a couple of turns with the electric sander (fun! as it turns out) and the nail gun (not so fun! but at least all of my mistakes were on pieces of wood and not anyone's fingers, thank goodness).

So anyway, we built these shelves, but I didn't want to put them up on the wall until the walls were repainted. And I couldn't paint the walls until the ceiling got repainted. And I couldn't repaint the ceiling until I had one of our builders (who will be working on a huge remodeling project for us next year, if the stars are in alignment and maybe some money falls out of the sky) cut out and replace a crumbling section of drywall from an old leak in the roof. So those poor shelves sat in my bedroom for a month before Dan-the-builder fixed the ceiling and I suddenly went on a painting binge and did basically nothing else for 4 days. I didn't eat lunch or do laundry or really, do anything else of significance, until the job was done.

For four days I tore off old layers of paint peeling from the ceiling and corners, gouged out old cracked places in the walls. I spackled until I could spackle no more. I spent an hour removing a horrid set of sliding closet doors that were never properly installed in the first place and gave them away after offering them free on craigslist. I filled nail holes and primed the trim around the doors and windows. I clipped a plastic dropcloth all around the ceiling fan and I taped and taped and taped until I ran out of tape and had to recycle a few bits I'd already used.

Then, I painted. And painted. And painted some more. I painted the ceiling, and afterwards my neck was so stiff from looking up I contemplated visiting a chiropractor (I didn't, and I'm fine now). When I primed and painted the trim around the window and doors and baseboard, my forearms felt like they were on fire from gripping the brush for so long. At one point I was so tired the can of primer slipped out of my hand and spattered the walls and windows with furious white splashes, a firm reprimand for my haste in getting the job done. By the time I got around to painting the walls, I wasn't sure I could stand it for another two coats. And at first, I hated the gold color Daniel had chosen because it looked so terrible against the indistinct pale beige it was covering.  

You know what? It was worth it. I love it now. Daniel's room has transformed. I don't know how much you can see from this grainy picture, but it's much, much nicer than it was:

There's more to do. Those shelves are actually still not up on the wall, I need to make a curtain for the closet opening (I really hated those sliding doors), and now that he's in 2nd grade and has homework from time to time, the poor kid could really use a workspace, like a small desk or worktable, so his papers don't end up all over the floor and the rest of the house like they are now. I want to paint the back of his bedroom door with chalkboard paint so he can write on it. I also promised him a new rug because the cheapo from IKEA that previously graced his floor had some old puke stains and no longer matched the walls. It needed to go.

It's just that I'm so tired of our house looking messy and crappy all the time. Silly complaints, I know. In the grand scheme of things, the health and happiness of my family is more important than interior décor. But a fresh coat of paint helps out a little bit.