Day 10 & 11: House of Labor

You know how on Labor Day, workers all over the country celebrate having a job by not going to work? Did you ever wonder where all that unused work actually went? Well, on Labor Day Weekend 2006, it landed at our house.

Sunday started off with the second coat of the metallic finish for the dining room, followed by painting of the rest of the walls, with the help of Lea's mom Sherry.



The metallic finish now looks fantastic, and all the green paint makes the hardwood floors in there actually look good.

I escaped early in the morning to the yard. Our lawnmower has been in storage for a year, yet it started on the first pull. It did this:



The mowing was followed by the introduction of an ancient tradition never before practiced by any previous owner of this house, known as the "Whacking of the Weeds." We also painted the mailbox red.



You'll notice that I took this picture before putting the address numbers on, you dirty Internet stalker.

Meanwhile, with no authorization from the homeowners whatsoever, Sherry starts Bill (King of Home Improvement) painting the ceilings. The ceilings, for Gods' sake!!



We'd toyed with the idea of fixing the ceiling if we had time, but we never imagined anyone would go ahead and do it! Look:



We didn't realize how grungy the ceiling was until it was painted over. Let's just say that someone who lived there in the past must have been a smoker. Painting the ceiling raised the light level in the living room alone by an order of magnitude.

Not all Sherry's ideas are quite as good, however. For instance, she'll insist up and down that you shouldn't use painters tape to prevent from painting where you shouldn't. I think I overheard her saying "Tape makes bad painters" or something like that. It sounded like a quote. She is of the school of thought that skill and skill alone should prevent you from painting over the line.

The problem is that I, personally, am already a bad painter. Painters' tape raises me to the level of a barely competent amateur. Trying to cut in between the ceiling and the wall without tape is nerve-wracking, and leads to errors in judgment with consequences like, say, this:



The error I'm referring to is, of course, the amount of paint overturned on me, and not only my choice of t-shirt.

After hours of ceiling painting, Bill (Knight of Home Improvement) and I slapped up chair rail in the master bedroom.



Those blue dots are bits of painters tape we used to mark the studs. The chair rail has a nice 'vine' pattern, so instead of painting it, we're just going to coat it with a clear polyurethane finish.



Unfortunately, putting up chair rail led to the discovery of a huge bulge in one of the walls, and the fact that the two windows are uneven.

That night, we finally got around to tackling the living room, with its 11-foot Ceiling of Dread. We were pretty successful...



..despite the best efforts of the Moms to distract us. In the last post, I hinted that I thought they were plotting something? I was right.



This is Sherry holding her psaltery. My mom has one as well. While we were trying to paint, the two of them were practicing duets. Unfortunately, the only songs either of them know are Christmas songs. Too soon!

Bill was hiding downstairs painting the basement, and he got about half of it done. The basement, while very large, is possibly the easiest room in the house since the ceiling and walls are all the same color. You don't have to be careful at all when it's all the same paint.

After everyone else left, Lea and I painted the closets in the guest room and hobby room, thinking it wouldn't take long. It did. We didn't get home until after 11:00, hence the lack of bloggery yesterday. Still, a finished closet is a finished closet, and we've got two of them:



Lea and I got up and finished the basement bright and early Labor Day morning.



Bill was able to use makeshift scaffolding to get to the hard-to-reach ceiling and walls over the stairwell, which I wasn't sure we were going to be able to do at all.



Thanks Bill!!!

...

This is where burnout began to set in. Our guests still had energy, but while this was Day 3 of house-work for them, it was day 11 for us. Lea and I were frustrated, annoyed, stressed-out and pretty much useless, yet Bill (Saint of Home Improvement) kept going, fixing a storm door, planing off another one, fitting a vent for a filter, investigating plumbing problems, etc.



Go Bill!!

We called it quits before sundown in the name of sanity maintenance.

...

You know how in horror movies you think it's over, then the monster jumps out one last time. The last thing we had Bill (Tireless Soldier of Home Improvement) do before closing up shop was to remove the built-in microwave from our kitchen so we could replace it with a traditional vent-hood. Once we got it down, guess what we found behind it:



AAAAAAUUUUGGGGHHHH!!!!



NNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

Damn you, wallpaper. Damn you.