I love the smell of latex paint in the morning...

To all of you who think that maybe someday you might want to take up smoking, I beg you not to. Everyday across the globe cigarette smoke is killing hundreds if not thousands of innocent ceilings. Three years into this house and we’re finally getting rid of the “natural” orange khaki color the nicotine and tar made our ceilings throughout the living room, and I assure you it is not an easy process. We bought a 5 gallon tub of Kilz2 which pours out with the consistency of a smooth milkshake and after the first coat the ceiling was a whiter shade of tan. KILZ!!! Its name states its objective quite clearly but even it couldn’t stop it from bleeding through the first coat! The stain also infected the roller causing the nap to turn into a disease-laden yellow after only a few passes. Towards the end of the first coat just as I was loading the roller up for the last little section I started smelling cigarette smoke. I think it was the ceiling letting me know that it would not go quietly into the night, and it most definitely has not gone quietly…

I’d also like to say that to all of you with a house built after the Harding administration and have sheetrock walls, know that you are a blessed people. A consistent surface texture, the ability to cut new outlets into it with ease, simple to patch, and relatively inexpensive; your world is foreign to me. Our walls are made out of shiplap or horizontal wood boards that have a thin covering of heavy paper glued over them. That’s it. Of course on top of that we have a veritable (potentially toxic) stratum of paint and wallpaper layering the surface. Two to three layers of wall paper (not including the top one I stripped off), three layers of paint, a thin layer of pure evil with a white primer on top. This does not create the smoothest of surfaces even if there weren’t eight-five years of cuts, gouges and scrapes riddling its ancient shell.

Spackle is a cruel mistress! Did you know that? It tempts you into thinking that if you just put a dab here and a skosh there that all your troubles will disappear. Lies! You’ll find yourself coming back time and time again to get your fix only to find that the more you use it, the worse it gets! You sand it down to try to smooth it out but that creates some dips in the surface so you add more but now there’s a bump in the middle so you sand again, over and over this cyclical life flows until your fingers are so caked with spackle that they form a sort of mitt and when you sneeze a white unidentifiable substance comes out!

If I can get through this experience without painting the furniture, floor, or animals, without falling off the ladder and without sanding my way through a wall I will consider it a success.

Is it bad that no matter where I am I smell paint?....

Lego Cake FTW!

I love that my generation is now influential and productive in our society. Geek movies abound, being a nerd is almost trendy and lego related products are flooding the market. It's a glorious time!