Monday, February 25, 2008

All Paint and No Play Makes Pat a Sore Boy

I'm not sure if it was the horrible tangerine color of our bedroom, or just because Shae loves to make me do shit, but somehow I got roped into painting our master bedroom/bathroom this weekend. Basically, the bedroom's not finished, I'm sleeping on the couch, and the people who painted our house last should never be allowed to touch a paint brush again. Ever.

I should have known we were in trouble on Friday when I got home from work and Shae hadn't started work on the room yet (my favorite part of the plan was the part where she did stuff while I was at work). After a few passive aggressive remarks to wifey, we got to work taking apart the bathroom. Of course, since it was evening, things got a little more interesting once we took down the light fixture. You don't need light to paint, right? Eventually we go the bathroom taken apart and primed, and called it a night.

After a freezing night (well, freezing for SD...we had to leave our windows open to ventilate the room), we got up and went to work on the bedroom. Everything from the bedroom and the closet went into the only room in the house with space to hold it all--the guest room. I just want to take a second to suggest to anyone reading this that if you're painting your bedroom and the only other bed in your house is in the guest room, you might want to find somewhere else to keep all of your crap. If you have to keep your crap in the guest room, at least keep the bed cleared. If you ignore those two suggestions, at least make sure that both of your air mattresses aren't stored in a closet in the guest room that you can't get to after filling the room up with all of your crap. Or, ignore my advice and just sleep on the couch. Shae and I chose the last option. We are super-smart sometimes.

Anyway, after we got all of our shit out of the room we went to work cleaning and prepping the bedroom. At this point, I have to ask: how hard is it to take off the outlet and switch covers? We've painted 3 rooms in this house and in every single room the previous painter(s) have been too lazy to take any of the covers off. Every switch and outlet cover has paint on the edges because apparently it's too much effort to take 20 seconds and remove the damn covers. The master bedroom, though, set a new standard in painting laziness. There was an alarm keypad on one of the bedroom walls that had some LEDs on it (this has now been removed). To block the lights at night, someone had taken a plastic card with the keypad instructions and folded it over the panel. When we took the instructions off sure enough there was paint on the sheet. Who the hell is too damn lazy to take a 3x5 laminated piece of plastic off the wall when they're painting? It took 1 second...it wasn't even taped to the keypad.

In contrast to this, the painters took the time and effort to paint (almost) the entire closet interior (including the built in shelves) to match the horrid orange. The one part that they left unpainted (of course one random wall wasn't painted, what else would we expect?) showed that before being painted orange the closet was white. It took about an hour to prime and another hour to paint the closet (and is a large part of the reason we didn't finish painting yesterday). Who the hell would spend (at least) an hour or two painting a perfectly fine closet a horrible shade of orange, but not take the five minutes (or less) it would take to remove all of the outlet and switch covers in the room?

Anyway, that's enough venting about the previous painters, back to our story. There's not a whole lot else to tell except it's Monday evening now and it's about 50/50 that Shae and I will get to sleep in our bed tonight. On the bright side, we "watched" about 10 movies (as background noise, mostly chick flicks) and I got to witness Erica and Shae taking turns shampooing the bedroom carpet. Even unfinished the room looks about 100 times better than the awfulness that was the tangerine, and hopefully we'll finish up the baseboards and touch-up in the next night or two and get moved back in. Pics will be uploaded to our photo album once we're done.