Painting the living room

I don’t like doing work around the house, so I tend to procrastinate and let it slide.

Case in point is painting the living room. The house is jam packed full of stuff, so I have to move it all, and then move the furniture and curtain hardware, and then clean, patch, sand, primer coat and then finally paint. And it’s the living room, so Grandma is a more-or-less permanent fixture there – so I kinda hafta do my work on weeknights after she’s gone to bed. It’s a pain in the neck, and it takes forever like this, ’cause I’m spending as much time on set-up and clean-up as I am actually getting stuff done. I guess it’s been about three weeks so far, and I still have to hang new curtain rods and paint the trim.

It was about eighteen years ago that Dad was redoing the room for our neighbors, the Franklins. Dad, bless his soul, didn’t know a lot about house renovations, plus he had me as his assistant, so he was doubly cursed. We put up new sheetrock on the walls and ceiling, and he relocated some of the electrical outlets from the wall to the baseboards. The work was kinda rough. There were a lot of rough edges, joints between panels were rough, extra globs of spackle around here and there… And after fifteen years of exposure to kids, kids and more kids – us and the day care kids – the walls were pretty badly dinged up. I think that Mom bought the house to be close to Dad’s work after he died – and because it was so close to where we lived before, so moving wouldn’t be such a big deal. But man, this place needs lots of work…

Hopefully when this room is all done and cleaned up, things will look decent. And then I can go back to a few more months of procrastination…