The World's Thickest Wall

The reason I have not posted in a while is because I have been painting. And of course, it seemed like a small job. When I was thinking about doing it I mean, not now. Square footage wise it's probably only. . . , well actually I suck at that type of guesswork. Anyway, it's just one wall and it's not even a full wall. It's a strip of wall over the inset wetbar and built-in bookcase (or in our house, a videocase), the two strips of wall on the sides of the wetbar and the backsplash behind the bar and under some cabinets. It doesn't sound like much, but what happened was...

Well, I decided to paint over the existing grasscloth wallpaper, as I thought it would make for an interesting texture. To paint over wallpaper, one must use an oil-based primer. Oil-based stuff terrifies me. Oil-based stuff is FOREVER. So that first night, with the first coat, I studied my entire surroundings after EVERY SINGLE brush stroke. And when I say first coat, I must mention that I did not consider it that at the time. I just thought I was doing the primer. The next morning is when I fully realized that it was the FIRST coat of primer. That grasscloth is quite the thirsty vixen. That next day, I decided to use the 3" roller instead of a brush and that part wasn't as bad. So 7 or so hours later, I'm all ready to roll on my first coat of Glidden's Deep Garnet. A lovely deep dark red.

I, of course, knew that painting the deep red over the white primer would take two coats, but at least now I was working with water-based paint. When you splatter that, you can clean it right up with a paper towel and a little spit. (Trust me, spit works better than water for that.) I did the second coat (except the edging) Tuesday night.

Well here it is Thursday night and I have some more spots that are lighter to touch up. I'm going to do that just as soon as I hit the "Publish Post" button. I seriously thought I would have this completely finished when My Sweetie got home from his business trip Wednesday night. Nope. But I have decided, that no matter what, I am taking all the blue masking tape down tomorrow and cleaning up all this mess. If there are still some slightly lighter spots I will just learn to live with it.

Meals On Wheels: Only one interesting thing happened Wednesday. This was with the lady that I've only mentioned as being the lady that lives in the gated apartments with the crappy security keyboard system. Well I've never really spoken to her. So this time I asked about her dog. She said it was a Shih Tzu. So I was telling her that my mom had one and she closed the door. She. Closed. The. Door. In my face. Right in the middle of a sentence. Yeah, that was different. I went back to Italliani's for lunch and Bobby grilled me as to where I had been the last two weeks, so I just told him that 2 weeks ago I had overslept and was too grungey to come there and that last week I had a craving for ribs. Both of those were true, just not 100% of the truth.

Okay now I realize that I am just putting off the painting. Tomorrow, I will take my after pictures and hopefully get my film developed this weekend. Still putting off the painting. Okay. Time to paint.