Yesterday was a phenomenally productive day. I was able to get the equivalent of probably a little over 2 days worth of work in. It’s amazing what you can get done when you have an extra set of hands to help with the work.
BG had casually mentioned the other day that she likes painting, which I had my doubts on as she didn’t get far in helping when I worked on her bathroom, but I tossed out the offer to help me anyway. I figured I could give her the simple pieces like painting the shelves while I worked on wiping down the walls so I could work on touch ups and painting the areas I’d left thinking cabinets would cover.
We started in the garage with what I had left of those cabinets. She got all the shelves coated while I finished up the last 3 cabinets. She worked on the shelves I had set up and prepped in the basement while I worked on the walls. By the time I had a couple of walls ready, she was done with the shelves and wanted to paint the walls, so I let her have at it.
Because we were moving so fast, already had my green paint out, and were looking at needing to stop to wait for that whole round to dry, we decided to just go a head and work on painting the stair walls. I’d put those off until I got closer to the end because I tend to bump them when moving stuff up and down, like all that wood. I’m far enough into this that whatever bumping happens now will be minor and easily fixable.
The plan was to get as far as the remaining paint in that can would get as we were close to the bottom. I worked on edging the walls out (and DAMN! there are a lot of edges in that space!!) and BG followed behind me with the roller. We got probably 3/4 of the walls done. All that is left is the smaller wall with the railing that still needs some patching and the upper funky sections near the ceiling by the door.
In all, I finished painting every cabinet, the walls are ready in the room, most of the stairway walls are painted, and probably about half of all the shelves are done. Basically, I’m ready to put the underlayment down and get most of the upper cabinets mounted, which is getting started today. I need some of those unpainted shelves done before I can mount a couple of the lower cabinets, but I’ll be working on those in between hanging the uppers.
I was absolutely stunned at how much got done. And BG? Holy crap! She put in about 5 and a half hours of work right along side me yesterday. She will probably never say she wants to paint again, but she didn’t complain one bit yesterday until we were almost done and that was just to let me know that her hands were starting to cramp.
While the cabinets went relatively fast, those shelves are taking forever because I only have so much room to lay them out to work on them. I didn’t think I’d be at this point for another few days, if not a little longer.
Yesterday was a really good day. I lucked out that she wanted to help. I also lucked out when my seriously broken brain didn’t absolutely screw me up. I’d gotten another can of paint because I ran out of what I was using for the cabinets. For some reason I asked for satin instead of semi-gloss (which is what I’d been using). Thankfully, there is no real noticeable difference between the two, at least in my color, so I didn’t have to go get another can to fix the mistake.
Sadly, things like that are becoming my norm lately.
TJ Fox: Sharing the Experience 