Progress, Followed By Coma (Or Vice Versa)

Because it’s late Sunday night and I just woke up sprawled in the middle of the master bedroom floor with both paint and drool dried on my face, and I’m still not exactly sure what is going on or whether or not I can form coherent sentences, I’m going to tell your the story of my weekend in reverse order. That’s right, we’re going to Tarantino it.

Because I have photographic evidence of exactly how it ended:

I was mid trim-painting, sat down in the middle of the bedroom floor, took this picture, and then either my body finally gave out or I was abducted by aliens (again), because I regained consciousness three hours later in this exact spot with no idea what the hell just happened.

I’d be worried, but this is the country. People get routinely abducted by aliens all the time and are just fine, thank you.

Plus, look at what I accomplished before my mysterious coma. This is the master bedroom before.

Why yes, those are brown painted doors. And trim. Shudder.

This room is nowhere near the top of my priority list, except for a little “peeling paint” above the fireplace that was noted by the appraiser as something I needed to repair. Try not to hurt yourself from rolling your eyes so hard.

I could have color matched a little dark green to the walls, spackled over these problem spots, painted it and called it a day. But I’ve been on a little bit of a roll getting rid of the hunter green around the house, so instead of taking the easy way out I popped open a gallon of Moonlight White and went to town…

I have to say, coverage on Valspar’s paint+primer combo is awesome.

I ran out of Moonlight White so I started in on the trim with some plain white semi-gloss. If you squint your eyes and tilt your head a bit when looking at this corner, you can just start to see what it will look like “finished.” (True of so many things in this house, including me.)

Paint? Check. Coma? Check. So that was Sunday.

Saturday actually started with with me laying flat out on top of the donkey barn with a death grip on the side of the roof performing psychological experiments to determine if I’m still mildly afraid of heights. And actually, “afraid” isn’t quite the right word… as a person who can barely walk three steps without tripping over her own feet, I think the phrase I’m looking for is “realistically cautious”.

I am realistically cautious about rolling off the roof onto one of the six wheelbarrows in my yard and lying there in a broken heap for all of eternity because when you live in the country… nobody is around to hear you scream.

But, lucky for me someone invented roof jacks exactly to prevent the death-by-donkey-barn-roof scenario.

Roof jacks or “roof brackets”  provide a support ledge to work from on the roof, and that’s all I really need. I’m actually not remotely afraid of heights as long as I’m either tethered or there’s something within reach I can grab on to when I trip and fall, because I will.

So, next weekend I’ll have roof jacks, shingles, and the help of a friend who has way more roofing experience than I do, and that donkey barn is getting re-roofed come hell or high-water.

That freed me up to check more miscellaneous stuff off the bank list after I recovered from my roof-induced panic attack, like the front porch, which got a second (and final) coat of floor paint…

And then I dragged my not-finished patio table and chairs out there, because I couldn’t help myself.

Yes. I sit on them just like that and it’s just as comfortable as you would imagine.

This means the front porch can officially be checked off the bank list. It also means the exterior of the house is thisclose to being rid of the last vestiges of hunter green. However, I had to move on from my painting marathon to tackle some other small projects that needed to get done.  Reparing this broken basement window being chief among them…

This is the only one of my 6 basement windows that at some point had been replaced with a vinyl window. (Which was then broken and patched up with a board.)

I would really like to rebuild a wood window to match the others at some point, but that is going to take more time than I’ve got to spare at the moment. So even though it pained me, I bought a replacement vinyl window at Lowe’s for $70.

The old window actually had never been fastened to the sill (or caulked, or insulated) so it was pretty easy to remove. And the only good thing I’ll say about the new one is that it does open which has helped air out the very musty basement.

So, that’s one coma, one hour spent paralyzed with fear on top of the donkey barn, lots of painting, a fixed window, and three new things I can check off the bank list. So basically a typical weekend around the Liberty House.

I’d call it a success.