Six Years.
It's been six years or so that we've lived in this house, and I still find it amazing how it's possible to just stop seeing things that remain to be improved. Especially - MOST especially - things that are encountered EVERY DAY. Perhaps two, six, ten or twelve times a day.
One such source of perpetual unsightliness has been the coat closet in our main room. It's the only closet on the main floor, and one has to walk from the front door, through the "living room" area to the "dining room" area to get to it. It used to be worse - but at one point during some renovations we had the outside of it covered in fresh drywall, and added folding doors instead of the broken slatted doors that were there from the original owners.
But the inside...the inside remained hideous. Beyond hideous. It was (WAS!) ugly, repulsive, repellent, unsightly, revolting, gruesome, grotesque, monstrous, ghastly, awful, terrible, appalling, dreadful, frightful, horrible, horrendous, horrific, horrifying, shocking, sickening, unspeakable, abhorrent, heinous, abominable, foul, vile, odious, execrable.
Bad.
And of course, I almost forgot to take pictures, but here:
This is just to show exactly how badly the paint was mis-applied. I recoiled in horror as I took this image, which might explain why it's blurry. But there's more:
This is the view to the left: some shelves. Chipboard shelves, crooked ones, and yes - a better view of exactly how barferiffic the paint colour was (WAS!);
AND how the coverage, it was slapdash. (WAS!)
And because I have no mercy:
(Shudders)
I know. And
shiny. Nobody should have to look at that. Lower down there too, were some live wires that we lived with for an embarrassing amount of time, before one day having a closer look and realizing HEY! The people who lived in this house before for us really were the biggest dolts on the planet! Cap those bad boys, we could die!
If you're curious, I believe that colour is called Badly Applied Puspukesnot Green, and that was (WAS!) the colour of the kitchen too (until last year - proving once again how, alarmingly, I can stop seeing incredible ugliness even when faced with it twenty times each day).
Oh, it's often bothered me, that gross closet, peeping out from behind our coats. But I have a child - a Josephine, no less - and there are always more projects and better things to do. Besides, it holds jackets and hats and shoes and the vacuum, and with the doors closed, who cares? Out of the twenty times a day I go in there, I'd care about the horror inside there only about half the time.
But recently, we cut through the little paint store nearby in order to say hi to the store's cat as we often do, and I got Mis-Tint Fever. You know what that is? Its when you see the little pots of custom colours - $5 for the small ones, $10 for the gallons - and projects come to mind. Instead of shopping for paint for a project, you get the paint and look for something to put it on. Here is this high-quality paint, already chosen and mixed right there - but because it was gray-blue instead of blue-gray, it was returned and is now less than half the price it would otherwise be. I sorted and tidied up our left-over paints in the basement recently, and realized we had some there too - but nothing right for the closet. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for a colour that would work.
For a few weeks, I've been wondering what it would take to just empty the closet and slap paint on it. There's no way it could ever be a good job - the closet is too badly made for that. It just needed to be done, and I had bet about three hours would do it. I was right. Josephine, now in daycare,and there one day each week when I can actually get stuff done around the house, thwarted and foiled me this week and last with her sickness. Last week she was so sick, and not just lay on the sofa and watch movies sick, but lay on my lap and whimper sick. Today, the opportunity presented itself. She was sick, but not miserable.
After we dropped the dog off at the vet's for her eye surgery, Josie and meandered through Value Village on the way home. We wanted to look for a puzzle, or a new video, or a new book to make yet another day at home with her cold more fun. She chose something, and we wandered into the paint store to pet their cat on the way home.
And I saw a colour, and kind of liked it, and had five dollars in change scrounged from the laundry, so it's like it was free, really...
So we got home, I dumped the closet, and I slapped that paint on.
Huge difference. HUGE. Huge. I made a little curtain to hide the hole (didn't even sew it - I used the factory selvedge ends at the top and bottom, and hemmed the sides with iron-on fusible webbing and mounted it with the staple gun), and just...wow. It's a quick job - no nail holes filled, the ceiling left undone, the inside of the front deemed not worth the effort...but wow. It's clean - it's brighter. It's not nice by any means...but it's niceER.
When Steve got home, he trimmed the screwed-up floorboards with his Sawz-all. Now, you have to look at this:
...becaue seriously, this is the kind of fucked up this house is: only three floor boards extended into the closet, creating a totally uneven floor in there, though you can't tell when the doors are closed. By trimming them, I now can find a carpet remnant to cover the bad old floor. I'd stopped seeing that too.
So, loaded up and looking at it now, the only thing I notice is...
Um..not much. Nothing really.
See? I don't notice a bilious green. I don't see half-assed brush strokes. What do I see? Just a closet. That's all. No horrorshow, no nightmare behind folding doors...and..oh...wow. This family has a little (whispers)
Converse problem.
So, how does it get to be a $12.99 makeover when the paint was only $5? Well, I had the brushes and fabric and stuff already...
The present Josie chose at Value Village was $7.99. It was a "
My Little Pony" Unicorn, and it came with a DVD having music videos and a short movie on it. Without that, I never could have accomplished this project. She put on her Unicorn costume, played with her ponies, and watched that DVD from start to finish twice.
Sometimes the best help is no help. And sometimes the budget for a project, when you're a mommy with a Josephine, means that the extraneous toddler entertainment things sometimes cost more than the actual project material things. And if can't be done within the amount of time based on what you bought to bribe your kid with, it isn't worth doing.
