Pratfalls of Painting

I decided to jumped from Christmas 2011 to present day.  The angst of apartment hunting, the misery of moving, the heartache of homesickness and the lament of loneliness is just not fun to write about, let alone expect anyone to read.

So, on February 1st, I became a tenant again for only the second time in my life.  Wanting to paint, I put off moving in immediately.  And February 2nd found me and my friend, Ingrid, priming the walls of my new living room.  It was good to spend that time with her and to have a jump start on the painting.  We spent three hours painting together, and, after she left, I spent another three hours finishing.  Nine hours for one coat of primer on everything.

I should mention this room (for I am reclining in my Lazy Boy in said living room) measures 19 feet by 12 feet.  That's a lot of wall space.  Except there are four windows, the front door and a doorway to the kitchen.  The windows are good size, too, which you would think would be good because they help lessen the amount of wall space to be painted.  Well, no and yes.  That is no, it's not good, but yes, it does reduce the wall space.  The thing is, it creates a lot of trim.

Surprisingly, the definition of trim that I'm using is the sixth one in the dictionary: "to decorate or adorn with ornaments or embellishments, usually on the edges."  In this case, I have baseboard, crown molding, four window framings and the front door framing.  The baseboard is broken up by two doorways and the four windows are placed (more or less) in the middle of the wall.  Crown molding however, covers every inch of the 228 feet of walls.  And the ceiling is about eight feet high.  My parents' living room ceiling was seven feet.

This difference wouldn't be a problem if I had a taller ladder.  But I don't.  My sister was going to come today to help paint and bring her taller ladder, but she was sick.  I was determined to get this living room done today, so I grabbed my shorter paint ladder and a longer-handled paint brush and went to work.

When I paint trim or cut-in I like to use my straight edge tool.  It doesn't look like the picture above anymore.  The blue part is covered with many colors of paint.  The edge, however, I keep clean.  You just jam this baby into the corner and paint away.  The nice, straight edge keeps the other side clean.  Well, that's what it does IF your walls are straight.  Even reasonably straight works, because you can shift the edge tool a bit as you go.

The corners of my apartment come close--in a few places:

That is an actual picture of the front wall of my living room.  The gaps are clearly visible both above (toward the corner) and below (in the middle) the molding.  I really wasn't sold on the white trim with the creamy tan walls, but I had run out of options.  The light rose color I was going to use was too "cool" and the peachy-rose color I had for the bedroom was too dark.  It looks fine, especially by the end wall, which is a deep blue:

Anyway, my handy edge tool wouldn't work well.  The crown molding was just too high up for me to do free hand (even if I thought my hand was steady enough to still do that).  What to do?  I grabbed the blue tape.

I hate that blue tape.  It goes beyond the fact that it's made by the company that so flippantly fired me 13 years ago.  The stuff is difficult to put up in a straight line because it'll stretch ever so slightly as you try to keep it firm.  It's difficult to take down because the dried paint keeps it connected.  If you just pull it, you leave all these tiny painted pieces of tape in the corners.  An even bigger problem is that it'll pull off bits of the paint from the wall it was taped on!  The first two problems you learn to work with.  Don't pull too hard when placing it and remember to break the paint-tape bond before you pull.  The last problem, though, seems to depend entirely on whim.  Since I didn't plan to use the tape, I taped as I went along, which doubled the amount of time I stood on the ladder--on tiptoe--with my head craned back.

A quick bit of background should be given here.  Comcast came on Friday to install the cabling for my internet connection.  (I got TV, too, since it came as a packaged deal.)  When the installer left, there was the typical octopus left behind.

So I was tired, sore and cranky when I was more than halfway through the fourth wall.  Ironically, I was running ideas through my head for a blog posting on swearing.  Since my mom passed on, I've noticed I've been cursing more, or at least using stronger words.  I was thinking how epithets show a person's ignorance and, unless there was a tornado coming, there were scores of words to fit the situation better.  Maybe if I'd been more focused on my painting and less on my next blog post, what happened next, wouldn't've happened.

I got off the ladder to move it down a couple of feet when I tripped over the octopus.  You know how some people will say they saw an accident and it seemed like it was in slow motion?  Not this.  It happened so fast all I could do was let out the f-bomb.  Yep.  If there was a word that my daughter would say I would be the last person in the world to use, that would be it.

I really can't give you a run down of the accident itself, except that I remember grabbing the paint container (with 3/4ths of a gallon of paint in it) as it tumbled off it's shelf (which is ridged, so that the paint cans can't slip, but this was Dutch Boy paint so it wasn't in a can it was in a plastic jug).

Huge amounts of white paint poured over the the ladder and the drop cloth below.  Now you'd think "Thank God for the drop cloth!" wouldn't you.  Heh.  This "drop cloth" was an old sheet folded in quarters because I was too lazy to pull the professional painter's drop cloth from my bedroom back into the living room.  While it did keep the mess a bit more manageable, it did not eliminate it.  White paint--actually Sweetened White paint--on the dark brown, brand new carpet.

I grabbed up the other two "drop cloths" and used those old sheets to help stem the flow.  I couldn't really get to cleaning the carpet until I stopped the white stream running off the ladder.  Trying my best to save some of the paint, I used the paint brush to push it from the ladder back into the can.  I used the edge of one sheet to wipe the leg of the ladder.  Then, after I was able to set the paint jug on the ladder, I turned my attention to the carpet.

The three sheets seemed to be containing the spillage, so I ran to the kitchen and grabbed an old cloth.  I wet it thoroughly with warm water and ran back to the scene.  As I lifted the sheets, I disrupted the little dam that the fold of one sheet had produced and another small wave of paint rolled down the edge of the carpet to nestle against the wall under the radiator.  Oh, didn't I mention the radiator?

Yes, there was also paint on the radiator and in the radiator and on the wall, the window sill, the window, the mini-blinds and me.  Thankfully, Khai, who had been following me around the room as I worked, had run off when I dropped that epithetical bomb.  Or maybe it was the banging of the ladder.  Whichever.  Anyway, the hot air from the radiator did not help since it was drying the paint faster than I could clean it up.  Of course, since it was a nice day, the radiator couldn't be in it's down cycle.  Oh, that's right, this electric heat doesn't have a down cycle.  I have it set at 53 degrees and the rooms stay at about 74 degrees.  Dare I hope it'll keep my electric bill down?  Probably not, since it runs constantly.

Even though I hadn't yet painted that one wall, the heat dried the paint into gloppy runs.  I'm thinking maybe I can lightly sand it.  And the window sill.  The blinds are plastic so I can scrape the paint off of those, but that's going to be tedious.  It's not like it was just a sprinkle or light splatter on them.  The window glass will be the easiest.

Well, at length I got the worst of the paint soaked up.  I threw all three sheets into a plastic bin I had just emptied that morning.  I worked on the carpet for the better part of an hour and got a lot of it up.  Not all of it, however.  But, at that point, with the heat blowing the whole time, there wasn't much more I could do with just warm, soapy water.  I've got to google how to get paint off of a carpet.

For once I was glad that the building's management was cheap.  The carpet seems to be nylon and, with luck, I'll be able to clean it better.  I could just imagine if it had been a natural fiber.  Yuck!

Let's see now.  I still have to paint the one living room wall and the baseboard on that wall.  Then there's the bedroom, kitchen and bathroom.  At least only the bedroom has crown molding and the bedroom ceiling is only seven feet high.  I have no idea why the living room is taller.

My original plan for today was to also get the wall in the kitchen painted where the buffet/hutch is going to go when the movers bring it Friday.  To quote Scarlett: "Tomorrow is another day."