Facebook statuses are too short

I know. One would think that it would take a big huge event to make me start blogging again. Something exciting. Something astounding. Something shocking.

Not really.

I'm painting. Not pictures right now, just walls. While cleaning my house a couple of weeks ago, I was horrified at the state of my walls. They're dirty, marked up, splattered with unidentifiable substances, covered in fingerprints. Dis.Gust.Ing. I've painted a few rooms since we moved in 3+ years ago, but most of them are still builder grade white. The last straw came when I tried to wipe an especially bad mark off the wall in the kitchen with an old green towel. The mark came off along with most of the paint but it picked up some of the green from the rag. Instead of a brown streak, there was a huge swipe of green. It was not an improvement. Builder grade paint is terrible stuff.

I decided it was time to bite the bullet, suffer the inconvenience and massive amounts of work, and just paint the house already. I picked out curtains and matched a general color and accent. Just 1 can of each to start. Then I decided I didn't really like the curtains, so I picked out different ones, but the colors will still work. I think. I haven't actually tried them together yet.

I started at the back of the house - the "breakfast nook" that serves as a craft room/painting studio/office/cat's room/ shoe closet. You can imagine how much stuff I hauled out of that tiny room. L finished her schoolwork in time to come down and help. She gamely did task after task, always asking if it was time to paint yet. After emptying the room, sweeping, washing the baseboards and walls, taking down the blinds, washing the light, filling the nail holes, taping off the trim, breaking for lunch, and covering the floor with a tarp, it was finally time to paint. It's amazing how much work must be done before you can get to work.

I let K and L both help, mentally squashing my perfectionist tendencies. I'm really picky about painting. No really, seriously, obsessively picky. K worked for about 15 minutes then declared that she was done. L stuck it out until she had to get ready for dance. We managed to get everything painted up to about 8 feet high then we had to quit because I ran out of paint. It was like throwing water at the Sahara. Those walls sucked up that paint in alarming quantities and I was using the good paint with a primer mixed in! There was no way that little room should have used that much paint.

One trip to Lowe's and a couple of lonely hours later, there's one coat of beautiful buttery creamy paint on the walls. I'm waiting for the paint to cure overnight, but it looks like the combined efforts of the girls and I have created enough of an uneven coverage to warrant a second coat in the morning. Then about half the furniture will go back in the room and a serious clean out of all the extra stuff will occur.

And then it's on to the kitchen!