Monday, October 10, 2011

6500 Square Feet


When you are painting, you have lots of time to think.  Today we started painting the house.  We began with a primer coat in the garage.  We have the prettiest garage you’ve ever seen.  County code said we had to sheet rock the garage walls and since it is part of the house it has the same insulation.  We went ahead and got a good insulated door too.  Nice garage.

Back to thinking.  So here I am dipping the brush and painting all the bends and borders where the roller won’t go and I start thinking about how we built this modest two bedroom house with large open rooms and I wonder to myself “what were we thinking?”.  

When Josh Wolf (Wolf Construction) told us we had 6500 square feet of sheet rock, I understood it.  You have all these walls and ceilings and some are double sided, so of course that doesn’t seem like a lot.  When you realize you have to paint 13,000 square feet (primer coat and paint coat) or possibly 19500 square feet (if you need extra coats), you wonder what possessed you to build a house.

Apple tree I shared with a bear last week.
I am sure these thoughts will pass as we progress in the painting process.  Right now it feels really overwhelming.  If there is a bright side, Sherwin Williams gave us our contractor’s price on the primer and they were having a sale on paint at 30% off.  These thoughts help tremendously.

So I paint and I think.  I think about it raining outside and wonder how much time we have before the first snow falls.  I think about mom’s 87th birthday tomorrow (10/11) and wonder how I am going to make it special for her when I haven’t been shopping and I don’t have a cake to bake.  I think about our wacko neighbors and the 800,000 pounds of fill material they destroyed the natural beauty of their property with recently and how it may or may not change flood levels on our property or harm the creek.  I think about Daniel’s purchase of a bass guitar and wonder if it’s the beginning of something really cool.  There is lots of time to think when painting.

‘Sagey’ is going to be the color of our living room, dining room and kitchen.  I left the desert for the woods and picked the color ‘sagey’.  Go figure.  The guy at the paint store asked if we wanted to get a quart to go home and try it on the walls.  Nope, just give us five gallons and we’ll learn to like it.  I think maybe a different color for upstairs, but I’m not sure.  I want to paint my bathroom some variation of purple.  Not the grape, but something warm and inviting.  

I told Don I was going to paint the downstairs bath blue and he balked at the idea and asked why.  I reminded him that when we staged our log home for sale I bought new blue and brown towels and we should use them.  He said we could paint the bathroom brown.  Not sure where we’ll end up.  

Gail & Grady's Horse Chestnut tree
Did I mention earlier about the texture debate?  Of course there are several textures to choose from when you are having sheet rock installed.  I wanted something very primitive, like old plaster.  Don is not into these things.  He balked.  I said absolutely NO to orange peel.  So we compromised as you learn to do when things just aren’t as important as they seemed when we were younger and settled on something called “double stomp knock down”.  I ‘m serious, I think that’s pretty close if not exactly what it is called.  

They use these brushes that look like a figure eights and are completely flattened.   With one in each hand (and I don’t have pictures because these guys worked way after I went to bed), they put the mud on the walls, then slap them with these brushes.  As it dries, they “knock off” the high points.  It’s hard to explain, but it looks nice.  I can’t wait to see it get “sagey”.

Meanwhile, we paint and I think.  I have 6500 square feet of thinking to do.

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