The Saga of the Cranberry Paint...

It's back to work after a long weekend today. These are some of the worst days to have to get up and go into the office. Mondays themselves are bad enough but after a three-day weekend they're worst. They loom like an unwelcome guest, their arrival inevitable and when the alarm goes off to wake us from sleep, we experience a moment of loathing, of hating that the weekend is over.

Of course, I say that after having one of those weekends that didn't really feel like a weekend. I had three days off but ask if I had fun and I'd have to answer with an honest, "not really."

You see, I painted my living room this weekend. I've mentioned in prior blogs that I wanted to do that before I moved in. I had my colours picked out: Cranberry and sage. I liked the samples, I knew I'd like the colour.

I still like the colour which, given the ordeal it put me through, is an amazing fact.

You see...I've never painted a room before. I've been either a parent's-house dweller or an apartment dweller my whole life. Painting wasn't really an option. So I was overjoyed to realize that now I own a house, I could paint it. I knew there'd be a learning curve, a series of trials and errors that are inevitable with each new experience. And, oh yes, believe me, there was a learning curve.

Last weekend, I happily went to Lowe's to obtain my cans of paint. I bought a can of "Cranberry" and a can of "Meadow" which is a pretty sage-green. My paint-mixer was a young man who expertly hit the right buttons to mix my paint and seemed to know what he was doing. So I asked him, "Do I need primer for the cranberry?" He looked at it and squinted and said, "No. It's our signature brand paint. It's one-coat coverage." I double-checked, he assured me it was one-coat coverage.

Let me tell you...it is NOT one-coat coverage. As soon as I finished my masking and prepping and started to roll that paint onto the wall, I realized I was going to have a problem. In my inexperience, I wondered if I just needed to wait for the paint to dry and it would work its one-coat coverage magic. Nope. Coat after coat and it finally began looking like a cranberry. It took three cans of paint to give me an almost-covered room. I could still use another coat but for almost $30 a can, I've overstretched my budget considerably. Ironically, when I was buying my third gallon of paint, another man waited on me and when he handed me my cranberry paint, he said, "has anyone talked to you about this Cranberry?"

"Why, no," I said, through gritted teeth.

"Well," he said. "You're gonna need a primer. Most reds do."

I glared at him which made me feel a little bad because he was being nice. "That would have been helpful to know YESTERDAY," I said, politely. "This is my third can."

He looked a little pitying after that which made me feel less bad about glaring.

I did get my room painted. I realized I'm not adept at detail work and while the green goes nicely with the cranberry, I didn't do so well at making the edges of the room trim look that tidy. At this point in time, I don't really care. I had planned on doing two rooms in three days. I barely got one room done. I worked from about 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day. It was not the most relaxing of weekends but it was productive.

In the end, I have a mostly-Cranberry room. As a messy Monkeypants, I managed to get rather a lot of paint on me. I painted barefoot so as not to mess up my shoes. This meant each day, I had rainbow feet and had to go home and scrub them off in the bathtub to return them to their non-painty state of being. There's nothing better than relaxing in the bath after a hard day of painting with a beer and a Sookie Stackhouse novel.

Of course, also as I am a messy Monkeypants, I made a bit of a splattered mess on the ceiling tooeven with my masking tape efforts. So I ended up painting the ceiling too. I worked hard on that, edging it properly and using an awful lot of muscle rolling above my head. I covered every surface but when I left the house yesterday to return to the blessedly unpainted walls of my apartment, I noticed it was looking a little patchy. I'm not going to pay any attention to that. I will say that to Lowes and your "Signature" paint by Valspar, it is not one-coat coverage in most cases and you probably should note that on your cans. After all, I used basic off-white ceiling paint and I made absolute sure I didn't miss a spot. Yet...somehow....it's still looking like I did miss spots. However, I do like how the good parts of the ceiling look with the cranberry and sage paint. So at least I'm mostly happy with the final result.

The irksome thing is that when people ask how the painting went and I tell them the Saga of the Cranberry Paint, the majority of people are very much, "Oh, you didn't know? You ALWAYS need primer for red paints." Um, yes...thank you, that's very helpful. Even when I asked some of the same people point-blank if they could offer tips and I told them my colour was cranberry, none of them piped up and said, "You'll definitely need primer." Why is it that people are only experts after the fact? It's like when you date someone and you have a nice time and then he dumps you because he's getting back with an ex-girlfriend. Everyone says, "Oh, you didn't know that he and Ms. X were almost engaged before?" or "Well, he only broke up with X a month ago." Naturally, he never told me and neither did they until after it's all over and you're left standing in the rubble feeling rather stupid and naive.

That's the part I hate: The feeling dumb. I know that, truthfully, I'm not dumb, I just didn't know. But as with everything, in hindsight, you realize you should have known better. I should have realized with my cranberry paint that I'd had to use a lot of paint when I did the edges of the room. Yet I was using a paintbrush; it's different from a roller.

I'm not holding anyone responsible for my snafu. The only person I'll hold responsible is me for not researching more deeply. I should have realized. However, I learned and future painting projects will be done a little more carefully. I have a colour called "Mulling Spices" for my bedroom. I don't think there's any red in it but you better believe I'm going to test out that colour first before I go nuts and try and paint the entire room.

Still, as I've said before and will say again, each day as a first-time homeowner is a new experience. I've now painted a room and can safely say that there are things I would do differently next time I paint. And since I have a whole can of "Mulling Spices" paint ready to go, that time is going to come sooner than later. I just hope that it's truly one-coat coverage. Hey, what can I say...I'm mostly an optimist. But I have a can of primer on hand...just in case.

Happy Monday.

Sometimes, It'd Be Nice to Have a Husband...

So I decided not to wait until tomorrow to blog even though, typically, I only blog on weekdays. It's been a few days since I had a chance to blog. The conference got the better of me. I did end up being social and going out both Wednesday and Thursday nights but I ended up watching other people drink rather than imbibe too much myself. It's amazing to see how much people let loose and also sort of fascinating in a voyeuristic way. I don't judge: I'm a firm believer that everyone needs to let down their hair once in a while.

The ending of the conference took a bit weight off my shoulders. It's hard to be social for such long periods of time; We started at 8 a.m. and went out until at least midnight. I was pretty exhausted by the time we got back.

Yet I wasn't too exhausted to ignore the fact that my house is now...my house. Friday afternoon, not too long after I got back from Indianapolis, I headed to my house, let myself in the front door for the very first time and took stock of what I had done.

I confess...when I saw my new house, I had a bad case of buyer's remorse. I mentioned that the previous owner was a sweet little old lady. However, I don't know whether she just didn't clean or just couldn't clean properly but I'm telling you, that house looked nasty. The carpets were grey with cobwebs, the walls filthy with stains. There was a layer of grime over everything. I walked through hoping to find something, anything to remind me why I wanted to live there.

Yet it was too late to back out. The house is mine. With a heavy heart, I finally plugged in my vacuum cleaner and went over each room multiple times. Three hours later and three vacuum bags full, the house suddenly looked different...better. The carpets were blue again and spending that much time in each room began to help me feel like it truly was my house. I moved on, throwing out many of the items the old lady had left behind. I couldn't decide if she forgot to pack them or she thought she was doing me a favour. For example, the fridge was still full of old mayonnaise, pickles, ketchup and cheese. Sadly, much of it had expired and what was left just didn't appeal so I did a thorough purge. At first, when I opened the freezer, I was excited. There was an unopened filet mignon in there, wrapped in bacon, ready to grill. Then I checked the date. It's "sell-by" date was July of 2005. Now, I'm a believer in freezers providing a way to preserve food but, well...that...was a little beyond preserving.

I spent the rest of the weekend shampooing the carpets. I love doing that, I've decided. Though the grime that came out of each room when I emptied the bucket of the Rug Doctor machine was disgusting, there was something very fulfilling about seeing it. I scrubbed down the walls and scrubbed the kitchen. I think the house is finally looking good. I'm going to paint next and have already begun putting masking tape down. It's my house and I'm planning on making it really mine.

It's been an exciting, if exhausting, weekend. I realize that, as a single woman, it's probably a little harder for me to get everything done. I don't have assistance when I'm doing anything. This makes the smallest things difficult. For example, I rented the carpet cleaner and brought it home only to discover it had a three-prong plug. The outlets in my house are primarily two prong. Back I went to Lowe's to buy outlet adapters. If I had someone to help me, they could have done that for me. When I was done cleaning the carpets, I had to run the carpet cleaner back. Again, an errand that I could have sent someone else to do while I started cleaning.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not complaining. I pride myself on my independence. I'm used to it. It's just hard sometimes when all the people who know I bought a house will tell me things I need to do and make me think of things I never would have thought of without them bringing it up. It's nice to have that type of help but sometimes, there are things I just can't think about because I simply don't have the time. I'd love to be able to get a lawnmower and mow the grass. I know it'd be cheaper to buy a used mower. However, that would entail finding the time to search Craigslist for a mower, arranging to see it, going to look at it and then buying it. I'd like to do that but, alas, I'm trying to move into my house and get it fixed up. I have to weigh my priorities. I have enlisted my sister and brother-in-law's help with that, asking them to keep an eye out.

I'd like to be able to do everything by myself; I'm just not sure it's possible. There are only so many hours in the day and with the house being 30 minutes from my apartment, the drive is a factor. On the plus side, there's a huge, lovely Lowe's store five minutes down the street. That's going to be useful. Well, actually, since I went there four times in two days, it's already been useful. Trouble is, each time I go, I realize just how much stuff I'm going to have to learn.

Still, it's all experience and learning and knowing how to do things is half the battle. Going it alone is always hard but there's something rewarding in knowing I found the house and bought it by myself and I'm going to get it fixed up just the way I like it without having to bounce paint colours off someone else. It'd be nice to have a husband to help with the hard stuff but, at the same time, he might not like the cranberry-sage colour scheme I'm going with in the living room.

There are some advantages to being a singleton.

Happy Sunday.