From My Fantasy Writing Desk Paint Roller
Usually I face that blank white screen and fill it with words. For the last week or so in our new home, I’ve been turning old, brown, flaking surfaces into fresh white ones, “dove white” to be precise. (I keep imagining I’m spreading peaceful calm over everything. Probably not . . .) You can see some of the cabinetry I’ve transformed in the photo below. I love natural wood, but these cabinets, window sills, door frames, etc. etc. have gone way past natural and are fully in the horror genre. Trust me. They needed a full transformation to be inhabitable. The irony of turning everything into blank white, like that screen I usually face, hasn’t escaped me. But it has its satisfactions.
Let There Be Floors in this new home
The floor guys will eventually put in hardwood. For now, I’m pleased that as of today, they are done with the prep. My husband pitched in with the really messy, hard labor of chipping out the old tiles and grinding away the mortar. Our new neighbor, who specializes in recycling “stuff,” found a home for all the tile that lifted out unbroken (how did it stay in place all these years???). A lady whose house had burned down collected it. Her delight was a pleasant bonus in the process. Now the floor guys have done the leveling–a careful process of grinding here and smearing self-leveling cement there. You can see the puddles of cement drying in the photo. Tomorrow we will clean all the mortar dust from everything. And I do mean everything. It will be a tedious process. Thank goodness we haven’t moved in, and “everything” means walls and floors and a very few essentials.
Rolling, rolling
Also this morning, the floor guys dropped off 700 feet of baseboards that all need paint. My husband and I turned some ripped-out shelving into saw horses, and I got rolling. I’m actually very patient with jobs like this, and I weirdly enjoyed getting half the baseboards done. That’s all the drying space we had. The other half will have to wait until these have cured enough for stacking. (My day’s labor, stored across the garage floor, is shown in the photo at the top.)
So, Tesha and the griffins will have to wait a while longer until I have the mental and physical space to write about them. For now, I’m happy turning this house into our home.
For another post about our new home.