Paint your wagon!

They’re gone!  Quiet descends on the house and I sink gratefully into the leather living room chair that has begun over time to conform to my shape.  I have survived the first day of the painting blitz. 

Fortunately, I don’t live in a wagon, but we are having the house painted (inside) after 27 years.  I wake early, prompted not only by my natural rhythm but by the knowledge that today the painters arrive at 8 am.  I jump into my workout clothes and hustle around my bedroom, taking down the blinds and hauling them to a living room that already resembles a Salvation Army store.  The bedside table, down to its essentials of lamp and clock is next.  I strip the bed (great time to wash the linens or, less poetically, the cottons), then any remaining smaller things.

I hit the weights.  Back up to change and have some breakfast before they arrive.  The doorbell rings at 7:57, as I’m still masticating my cereal and milk.  The two brothers begin the unloading process and I begin my life on the ground floor.

Fortunately, it’s unseasonably warm so that when the smell of whatever they’re using begins to work its way downstairs, they can open the windows without blowing my monthly heating budget.  How can they work in the middle of that smell when it feels that I’m on the verge of a headache from it downstairs?  Thankfully, it gradually dissipates and I don’t hear any bodies thudding, overcome, to the floor upstairs.  While all this is going on, I’m bouncing from task to task, packing away first floor breakables, taking pictures from the wall (Why all the dust?  You mean I haven’t been regularly dusting behind the pictures???), taking things to the basement where the trick is finding somewhere to stash them while still leaving space for me to work out or do the laundry.

The painters work hard, with no discernible lunch break, and are ready to leave at 4 pm.  There have been a few “Uh-oh” moments but nothing major,  no small accomplishment in a house that was built in the early 30’s as an experimental home, a house with a metal frame that began life covered outside with brown ceramic shingles.  (One day I looked out the window to see a younger woman walking up the drive, eyeballing the house.  I opened the window and asked if I could help her, my nice way of saying “What the heck are you doing in my driveway?”   She responded that she used to live in the neighborhood and wanted to see “the haunted house.”)  All too often whoever is working says something along the lines of, “Wow, that’s unusual!”, which in cost terms,  translates directly into paying more for that job.  I was once told that the metal tiles in our half bath (also underneath the more normal tiles now in the shower) “should be in the Smithsonian”. I responded that I’d be happy to have them there if the Smithsonian would like to purchase them.   Even the backs of the stairs going to the second floor are metal.  I discovered this by chance when cleaning them one day and thinking they didn’t feel like wood.  I grabbed one of the ever-present fridge magnets and tried it on the step, where it stuck!   (Are step magnets a new market possibility?)

So far, it’s hasn’t been bad.  They listen to Christmas music and appreciate the homemade doughnuts.  They tell me they’re working as fast as they can because they know I don’t want them there forever and give me suggestions about the best way to do things.  They clean up well when they’re finished.

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They’re gone!  Quiet has once again descended at the end of the second day.  Although not finished, the upstairs already looks infinitely better.  Tonight I’ll sleep again in a room without blinds, next to an armoire, dresser and trunk swathed in plastic but soon, I’ll be snoozing in a room that looks like new.  That will be worth it and I can’t wait!