Saturday, September 08, 2007

Plaster repair despair

Several weeks ago Mr. T&A and I embarked on the project of painting our bathroom. We were fresh off a smashing success in painting our office ("Plantain," a very nice yellowish green), and the bathroom is teensy, so it seemed like it should be relatively painless.

Ahh, the folly. We've spent eons chipping off layers of wallpaper and paint (the bastards who painted over a wallpaper border should be condemned to an eternity of trying to remove it). This has resulted in a disaster zone of cracked, holey plaster with random patches of paint. Tonight I attempted to patch some of it with spackle, but it was like trying to smooth out a 90-year-old's face with frosting.

To add to the problem, the other day, weeks after we started, we realized that our house is old so some of the paint we're chipping off probably contains lead. And we're having a baby shower here next weekend. (For somebody else, not me!) Pregnant ladies are not supposed to inhale lead dust. So now we need to clean the house using an EPA-approved method involving a HEPA vacuum cleaner and 3 separate buckets, and even so I feel like the worst baby shower hostess ever. (Plus maybe we've already lead-poisoned ourselves.)

Anyway, I have now officially hit bottom on the bathroom, and have acquiesced to Mr. T&A's plan to hire somebody else to do it. I now realize that I had been harboring visions of myself as a budding home-improvement guru, but now those dreams are dashed. Maybe I'll try gardening instead.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As a recent home-painter myself, I can tell you that we, too had grand ambitions of becoming the next Bob Vila or Ty Pennington, or whomever. But painting sucks. And it makes my back hurt. So I swore that next time we'd hire someone to do it. And of course, my co-pet owner claims there won't be a next time because she LOVES the new color. But I know better. Six months from now, she'll demand a wholesale change. I wonder what that says for me (or our pet)?

Anonymous said...

Give me a break. The new color is thoroughly inoffensive and goes with the bedding. At least, that is how I feel right now. And don't worry about you and the pet; you are both variations on beige and thus coordinate with any decor.