Never Let Your Wife Pick the Paint

Yesterday and today, my Big Project has been to paint Agnes's sewing room. Well, not exactly ... three of the four walls are panelled, so there's only one to paint. Easy, right?

No.

First of all, there's no way to paint the entire wall without moving multiple work tables, chests of drawers, and bookshelves (all piled high not just with books, but with piles of fabric) out of the way. And then there was the big, ugly patch in the center of the wall where we had to cut through several years ago to fix a leak in our outside hose bib. Oh, and the two windows. And the valence*.

The end result was that we moved whatever we could, and I painted a bizarrely-shaped section of the wall that will look silly if we ever have to move the Immovable Tables and Chest of Drawers out of the room.

Oh, and the paint.

Agnes chose a color called Green Peridot, which is a Ralph Lauren Polished Patina finish that requires both a base coat and a topcoat. The base coat is okay ... goes on with a brush and roller, although it took forever to put up all the masking tape around all the things that weren't supposed to be green. The top coat, however, is very thick - almost a paste - and needs to be applied with a specially-designed Ralph Lauren Polished Patina Application Tool**, which is cleverly designed to be too large to get into some of the areas around the windows and the Immovable Table and Chest of Drawers.

As Kermit would say, it's not easy being green peridot.

I guess it's going to look great when it's finally done. It had better.

Next time, I'm picking the paint. And I'm only painting bare walls. Or nude models.

And if you run into me in the next day or two and I look a little green, it's paint ... not food poisoning.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* If it'd been a liberty valence, I'd just have shot it.

** Which looks suspiciously like a common broad-bladed putty knife without a handle, but costs the GNP of an average third-world country ...