Adventures in Home Ownership, Take 3 — The Paint Chronicles

So back in October, we bought a house. More accurately, we bought a 1.5-acre plot of land that is largely unusable in its present condition and has a perfectly usable 7-year-old single-wide installed on it. I owed a house back in the mid-00s that I lost to foreclosure during the Recession; Len and I together also owned a house back in 2010 that we lost to a (terrifying) fire. So this is take two for him, take three for me.

You would think we might have learned some things, but nah. We are entirely winging it.

We had spent the previous two years or so living in a 32-foot fifth wheel, paying lot rent that was less than half what we’d been paying in rent for escalatingly bad roommate situations. In a 32-foot fifth wheel, you do not have a whole lot of room for… anything. Furniture, extra toilet paper, dishware, groceries, you name it; space for absolutely everything was at a premium. Our couch was too small and our bed was uncomfortable; the kitchen sink couldn’t hold a full-size colander or a cookie sheet (although that was fine, really, since the oven couldn’t hold a cookie sheet either) or a stockpot. Moving overnight from around 300 square feet to 1,200 was kind of a shock to the system.

We knew we needed to paint. Some of the walls still boasted that fabulous textured wall covering that makes manufactured homes just so… ick, but other walls had been carefully repainted a color I can only describe as “fresh cat litter.” Like someone went to Home Depot or wherever and asked the guy at the counter to just mix up a 5-gallon bucket of the least attractive color he could possibly create. Len was also convinced that we had to paint the ceiling. Just had to. Couldn’t possibly live with the ceiling.

In retrospect, I should not have let him spearhead the painting project.

I really wanted to remove the batten strips and fill in the cracks so we could have smooth walls. My labor-intensive project idea was summarily dismissed as too labor-intensive to be worth the results. I remain unconvinced — the batten strips look even sillier once they’re painted over, and they get in the way of anything you might want to hang on the wall.

Anyway, first, he decided, we needed a paint sprayer. A paint sprayer, he told me excitedly, would save us oodles of time dealing with the unbearable tedium of painting every surface in a 1,200-square-foot house. I am all about reducing tedium, so I did not ask the questions I should have asked or perform the research I should have performed. I allowed myself to trust that he had it handled. This was a poor judgment call. He purchased a paint sprayer from Amazon, pulled it out of the box, loaded some paint into it and started spraying.

Later, long after he had given up in a flurry of curses and deemed the paint sprayer a cheap piece of garbage, I would find the instruction manual buried under a pile of Home Depot bags in a corner of the dining room, still wrapped in its original plastic packaging.

Len is generally very handy and he does know his way around tools — heh — but this was new to him and he decided to learn by doing, an impulse I certainly relate to but typically try to restrain in myself when we’re talking about potentially wasting hundreds of dollars if it turns out I screw it up. In the end, about three gallons of white paint wound up on our bedroom ceiling and then the sprayer stopped working. I finished painting the bedroom myself by hand. It was even more tedious than I had anticipated, and each time I had to cut in around a batten strip, which was constantly, I felt a hot little surge of bone-deep irritation.

Neither long-term relationships nor home renovations are for the faint of heart.

I painted my office a pretty shade of blue, and we painted both of the bathrooms — he did deign to step in and help with the areas I wasn’t able to reach because I am a normal-sized human female and I was afraid I might break my neck trying to balance on the edge of the bathtub to reach the top of the wall.

The living room, you know, the room in which we spend all of our time, is covered in swatches — no lie, it took us 22 paint samples before we settled on a color — but hasn’t been painted yet. Also, the ceiling in the living room actually does need to be painted, as there are enormous patches of some other horrible paint color — not Glidden Fresh Kitty Litter, but some other color, more of a mustardy brown — up there. Our ladder situation is such that we have one large ladder that will not fit in the living room and we have a small stepladder that will not allow me to reach the ceiling. I’m not even sure if we have any ceiling paint left after the sprayer debacle. I don’t have adequate coverings for our furniture and our sectional is so heavy I can’t move it by myself. Len’s reaction to any suggestion that perhaps this weekend — any weekend — we could finish painting is a noncommittal shrug followed by a rapid change of subject. We have lived here for two and a half months. I know he is still embarrassed by and mad about the sprayer situation but this is getting silly.

We will probably have the mortgage paid off before the living room is painted.

All in all, though, it’s not bad for take three.