Does This Color Make Me Look Gay?

We spend a lot of time in our parlor (a word I'd never used in the first 48 years of my life). It's a nice place to sit with our coffee and newspaper in the morning or a glass of wine in the evening. It gets morning sun and affords a great view over the main street. You can even see the ocean from here. If we're not in the kitchen or flopped in front of the TV, we're probably in the parlor.

So why has it taken us so long to paint this room? It's been this dark-green color since we moved in, which went oh-so-well with the blood-red carpet. The carpet disappeared six months ago, but the walls remained green.

Until yesterday. Out came the paintbrushes, up went the ladders, and pop went the can openers. Three new paint cans, three new brushes, and three new rollers. We're in bidness.

First step: put primer over the dark green paint. I like to do primer coats because you don't have to be very good. It doesn't have to cover very well, and you don't really have to get everything. If I get 90% coverage I'm happy. I get to play with the paint without having to worry about feathering edges, cutting in, or any of that technical stuff.

After the primer comes the first color coat. We're using two colors: one on the walls and a lighter shade on the ceiling. I did the ceiling while Kathy started on the walls. If we do this right, we'll both finish at about the same time. We're a good team.

I'll just come right out and say it. We're painting the room purple. Yup, it's our lavender love lounge. Really, it's not so bad, and it complements the old wallpaper in the adjoining rooms (which may not say much for the wallpaper, I realize). The new color lightens up the room quite a bit.

Paint colors have funny names. Kathy will tell you that I deliberately avoid reading the silly names written on the back of the paint samples so that they don't color (sorry) my decision. I don't want to know that one shade of white is called Wedding Cake while another is named Shroud of Turin or Albino Bicuspid or something like that.

Case in point: Our new ceiling color is called Mystic Fairy. Really? Can you see walking into Home Depot and asking for a gallon of Mystic Fairy? "Would you like the matching lipstick with that, sir?" Stupid paint companies.

Tediouser and Tediouser

For a small garage, this thing sure has a lot of surface area. Doesn't that violate some kind of law of physics? Maybe it's a three-dimensional fractal. Mandelbrot's Garage.

Kathy tested this theory a few weeks ago by starting to paint the garage doors. Simple, you say. Yet somehow, six hours later, we still had more to go--lots more. This place is all nooks and crannies and tiny places inaccessible to paintbrushes.

Even the siding on the walls was more time-consuming than we imagined. We'd considered using a paint sprayer but decided that (a) too much paint would blow away in the wind, and (b) it'll be easy with a brush and a roller. "How hard can it be?" has been our mantra this last year or so.

After a few days of fair-weather painting, the garage is now mostly painted. The white part is about done, but we still have to paint the contrasting trim colors around the top. But that, in turn, requires permission from the city. More on that later.

Are You Board Yet?

Wednesday was woodworking day. And the project of the day was to strip and repaint the base molding in the upstairs kitchen.

That's trickier than it sounds because the kitchen cabinets are now in entirely different places than before, so none of the molding will fit back in its original location. Instead, we have to cut and combine pieces to fit the new arrangement. There's one long wall, in particular, that has no cabinets on it so it needs one long piece of base molding.

Which is what you see here. The molding is redwood, like most everything else in the house. It was painted white (also like nearly everything else), which is fine, except that the white paint was about the 23rd coat of paint on this miserable board. So rather than add a 24th coat, I stripped off all the old layers first, then primed and repainted it... white.


I did that to two of the longest pieces we had, then mitered and joined them together. I also took the opportunity to fill in some of the bigger gouges and holes with wood putty. I didn't want to make the molding look perfect (as if) but did want to remove some of the nastier bits of character it had acquired over the years.

Now that it's all done it looks like... white base molding. Big deal, I know. But that's two days of work yer lookin' at right there. Admire it. Now.