How to Paint a Room in Ten Easy Steps

1. Prep-work prep-work prep-work! It's been said that 90 percent of painting is prep-work. Okay, I don't know if that's actually been said except for me saying it, but the percentage feels right. There's so much to do before you even start painting-- decluttering the area, dusting, vacuuming... Because the last thing you want is to find a cat hair painted forever against your baseboard.

2, This week is Paint the Kitchen Week and I am ready. Painting clothes on. Hair tied back.

3. Shoot. I forgot to take all of the light plates off the walls. Side note: PLEASE DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP. Case in point: at the our last house, when I was removing the light plates, I realized that the previous owners had left the plates on and painted right over them. Total amateurs.

4. Primer everything. Wait. First, you've got to wash the surfaces you'll be primering. I got this tip from the guy who was standing behind me in line at the paint counter at Lowes. I was asking about primer, explaining to the Paint Clerk that the people who lived in the house before us smoked and now everything smelled smoky and what kind of primer was best for this problem, and the guy behind me piped up that he knew all about that, being a contractor and just having painted an entire house where six people had smoked up the place for twenty years.

The secret: a solution of water mixed with bleach and Dawn Dishwashing Liquid.

For the record: this is a messy yucky job and it takes a good part of a day.

5. Primer everything. Two coats. (This takes two days.)

6. Paint the ceiling. I have never painted a ceiling before but how hard can it be? I watch a bunch of Youtube videos. And I'm ready. Side note: It's not hard, exactly, but I do get a nice crick in my neck that reminds me of that summer I painted all of the McDonalds in Central Connecticut. 

7. Paint the walls! No, wait. First, you've got to tape everything off. I used to do this step religiously, but after painting what feels like a thousand rooms, I am more confident in my ability to paint a straight line. Still, it's a good idea to tape what you absolutely do not want to ruin. The kitchen cabinets, for example. This step takes a good two hours.

8. Paint the walls!! The color we've chosen is called Familiar Beige and I think it's lovely. Warm and brown. A few weeks ago I painted swatches of it on every wall to make sure we all really like it. We all really do.

But now that I've painted a wall,

I'm not so sure. Maybe it's clashing a little with the cabinets? No. It's fine. I keep going. I paint the entire kitchen and the back entryway. When my husband gets home from work, I ask him what he thinks and he hesitates. It looks a little red? he says. I argue with him that it does not look a little red. And anyway, what's wrong with a little red.

Nothing, he says. Forget I said anything.

I send him off to buy another gallon of Familiar Beige so I can paint the second coat, but as he's walking out the door, I say, Maybe we can change the cabinets?

He hesitates again.

Whatever. I AM NOT PAINTING THIS KITCHEN A DIFFERENT COLOR!!

We have a nice long bickery argument with our daughter looking on and shaking her head.

My husband flips through our collection of approximately 200 thousand Lowes paint samples and picks out another color, something called Salt Crystal that looks a lot like the color of the cabinets. He is so wrong about this color selection and I tell him 50 times and then I send him out to buy it.

8. I paint the entire kitchen again in Salt Crystal. Twice. It's creamy and delicious and makes me think of buttercream frosting and damn it all to hell, my husband is right. I do something I rarely do. I tell him he is right.

9. Paint the trim. Twice. (Two days)

10. Peel off the painter's tape. (Two hours)

Wah lah!

Now it is time to paint the dining room.

Things I Did This Weekend Instead of Writing a Blog

Goal this weekend: Write a blog

(side note, I write four blogs a month. It's a goal I set for myself a few years ago and for the most part I do it. It's a weird goal because I mean, who cares? I don't get paid for these blogs. Nothing bad will happen if I don't post one, but still... it bugs me like a little itch when the end of the month sneaks up on me and I haven't yet written my fourth blog.)

Instead of writing a blog, I did this:

*Made a turtle out of clay

with my friend Natalie at this pottery place where we were supposed to play around with clay and make cups or bowls and decorate them in a whimsical way, and I started getting panicky/perfectionist-y, how I always do when it comes to arts and crafts, but I kept playing with the clay, joking that I'd let it speak to me and tell me what it wanted to be, and weirdly this worked. 

It wanted to be a turtle. 

*Caught the tail end of Mindy McGinnis signing her fifth book

at Cover to Cover Book Store and got my book signed and talked to the owner, Sally Oddi, about how she is going to retire and sell her bookstore!!! --something that is killing me because Cover to Cover is an awesome bookstore (one of the oldest, continuously operated, children's bookstores in country-- 37 years!!) If you want to buy it, please call Sally. 

I'm serious. (614) 263-1624

*Went out to dinner with Natalie because we realized it was our three year Friend-a-versary, and if that is not a thing, it should be.

*Read most of the book Dreamland by Sam Quinones

which is a really horrifying examination of the opioid epidemic and how Big Pharma pushing pain meds and misleading doctors about how addictive these drugs are was happening around the same time a group of men in Mexico started selling black tar heroin in small towns across America.  

*Helped my neighbor paint some trim on his house

Because last summer he helped my husband and me paint our back porch, and I was like, No problem, I can totally climb up onto your roof and paint that small stretch of trim. This was scary but I inched up and down the roof on my butt and fell into a zen-like place of painting and thought about the time when I was nineteen and got hired on by my boyfriend's painting crew to paint the trim of all of the McDonald's in the Central Connecticut area. 

*Tore a hole in my shorts from inching up and down the roof on my butt.

*Mulched my flowerbeds

*Helped my husband lay a brick patio

 Oh. And I guess I wrote a blog. 

The end.