The Ink-Pot and the Palette

It's been true all my life and I don't see it changing at this late stage: I'll accomplish things for a deadline or for someone else that I'll let go for years when I'm my only audience.

kis has several times expressed a concern that I'm overdoing the home improvement for their visit (in three days! Eeeeee!!!), but it's a fantastic motivator, and I'm not doing anything that didn't desperately need doing.

It's the back end of a perfectly splendid September Saturday, and I'm happily tired (and prophylactically dosed on ibuprofen), having sawed, spackled, chiseled, pounded, painted and pruned things that have been left undone for as much as ten years. Several of them seemed too difficult or too complex for me to tackle, but with the Magic of External Motivation® I suddenly found simple, obvious solutions.

It's like getting a new house! I hardly know the place.

Ed, bless his hard-working heart, came over today in the ungodly heat and put the final touches on Project Empty: Phase II, Mudroom.

( The ever-popular Way Before, Before, and After shots )

Today my new door is due to arrive, and this evening I get my new mattress.

Door and mattress. I remember a day when I wouldn't have considered either of these things as exciting as I do today, but here's the thing. There's been a sheet of plywood screwed to the back door frame for weeks, and if I want to use my refurbished back yard--which I do--I have to go out the front door and around the house (through amazingly recurrent spiderwebs) carrying my computer, my iced beverage and my phone. Decency demands, incidentally, that I be dressed before I do this.

So by Saturday I hope to be able to rise from the supportive and yet yielding splendor of my memory-foam-enhanced bower, drop the coffee beans on the floor if I want to and be able to reach down and pick them up, and then, coffee drink in hand and possibly still wearing my bathrobe, exit privately to the umbrella'ed table next to the gently plashing rehabbed home-made water feature in my charming outdoor living space, and there be the Queen of All I Survey.

And not a moment too soon, either, because even more importantly, my lovely guests kis and Mr Kis will be able to enjoy the same during their visit, which is less than four weeks away! Eeeee!

I got an estimate this morning on Project Mudroom: The Continuation. And it was an estimate I could actually live with.

( Project Empty Phase II.i Mudroom Continued, Section B Paragraph 6 (c) The Back Yard )

I have poured the concrete. After much muddling about in my mind about how to mix and transport 120 lbs of concrete, I ended up just slitting the bags open right in the wheelbarrow what brung 'em to the backyard, and running the hose in there.

Mix with shovel.

Shovel into bucket.

Dump bucket into form.

Repeat several times.

( ...et voilà! )

The worst is over. It really is. Now I can just finish painting and clean up. Basically. I hope.

I'm giving myself the evening off for good behavior. Well, for cleaning.

There comes a point in every house project where tools and substances normally hidden away create such a mess being out all over the house that nothing else can safely happen. I'm way past that point.

I have a peanut-butter jar full of peanut butter, and not far from it in the kitchen, an identical peanut butter jar full of peanut-butter colored paint. And I'm tired. I foresee a paint-and-honey sandwich in my very near future.

Sigh. I really wanted this thing to be done by yesterday, but I ran out of steam.

So, podfic to go and back into the grubby clothes for some inspiration-renewing tidying up. And hazard abatement.

OMG it's almost done. The mudroom is scraped, stripped, scrubbed, de-epoxied, thoroughly cleaned (several times) and primed. Today, after a full week of "painting," I'm finally going to paint.

Here are some things I've learned, re-learned or proved to my complete satisfaction:

• Liquid fabric softener, which is nearly as toxic in its own way as some of the other substances I've been working with all week, really does make latex paint slide right out of paintbrushes and rollers
• Light-reading audiobooks and fun podfic make the job go faster, but surprisingly, serious non-fiction audiobooks work well too
• Rockite is my new favorite thing
• It always takes longer than you thought it would
• Four ibuprofen just before bed are like a really good sleeping pill
• Posting "before" photos really motivates one to get to the "after" photos
• Once you are soaked with sweat, you can stop worrying about being sweaty

Okay. Paint! Pea green, deep navy blue, and cream. We'll see how it looks.

The Bathtub of Resuscitation has come to my aid once more.

After a day of high-90s temps, during which I primed woodwork, chiseled concrete, scrubbed completely ineffective stripper off of whatever paint-like substance is coating the foundation wall in the mudroom, and generally knocked myself out, I had a long, cool soak in the BTOR, while watching an episode of Doctor Who.

Then I had a strawberry teff pancake, and now I'm going to bed. Tomorrow: more stripper of a nastier variety, a wee bit of concrete pouring, and paint!

It's all very well to pour on the steam, to scrub and scrape and sweep all day long getting ready to paint, but I forgot how much it hurts later on. My hands hurt, my hips hurt, my knees hurt. Waah!

Then I had to go to work today. I'm supposed to be on vacation--Friday the 2nd through Sunday the 11th, right? Ten solid, uninterrupted days. But no. They had a crisis, and none of us on the team have any backup, so in I went. The entire system is predicated on basically either everything going smoothly, or no one taking vacation.

happytohaveajob...happytohaveajob...happytohaveajob....

And I really am, but between the pain and the work crisis, I made no progress on Project Mudroom today, and it's supposed to get super hot tomorrow. Boo. Hiss.

On the plus side, the paint should dry fast.

I've drunk two pots of coffee. I've been to the hardware store and to my sister's tool room and my basement. I have now assembled one great piece of podfic :D, several quarts of leftover interior and exterior house paint, most of a gallon of Kilz primer, a box of TSP, rubber gloves, a bucket, a scrub brush, a mop, a respirator, fresh filters for the respirator, concrete paint (tinted black), a cheap light fixture, brushes, rollers, rags and crappy paint-stained clothes.

I can't procrastinate any longer. Well, I can--it's what I'm doing right this minute--but I'm not gonna.

Wish me luck. I'm goin' in.