After a couple of weeks (or maybe just one week? What even is the passage of time tbh) it’s very very summery outside, which means that inside it is a stuffy sauna. Yesterday it was so muggy in here, usually Mondays aren’t that bad because Taylor works from home on Sunday nights and keeps the windows in the office & kitchen open, but there was a massive skunk spray right outside so we had to close everything because it was TOO GROSS. This morning I got up early to open all the windows I could (ie the four that have screens in them) and turn on all the fans so hopefully it won’t be as hot, and blessing of blessings, last Friday the property manager & handyman came by to measure a bunch of my casement windows for screens! (In case you don’t know casement windows are the ones that open outwards and need custom-fitted screens on the inside of the frame). They are only doing screens for five of the seven casement windows (two in the living room, one in the dining room and one each in two of the three bedrooms) but GOOD ENOUGH. I just can’t wait to get a goddamn cross-breeze in this place!
In more home news, over the weekend Taylor and I (and a very helpful Gwen) were able to finish painting Gwen & The Dreaded Laramie’s new room! Friday I had a surprise day off so after we finished moving the last of Sym’s furniture out I filled all the holes in the walls to get ready for priming. We hit a small snag when I was buying spackle and discovered the hardware store by our house is… not really a hardware store anymore? It was taken over by an older woman a few years ago and she seems less into selling hardware than refinishing antique furniture and setting up displays of old china and vintage jewellery. I DON’T EVEN KNOW YOU GUYS. Over half the shelves are just empty but luckily there was one thing of spackle left. I did notice there were basically no painting supplies (although they still seem to carry paint), so on Saturday morning we decided to walk down to a different small hardware store at the bottom of the hill to get all the rollers, edgers, tape, dropcloths and trays we needed.
Taylor offered to go by himself but I was like “no, you’ll get the wrong stuff (more on this later…) and if we take this different walking route that is just barely out of our way we can play Pokémon Go!” So that’s what we did, and in the end it wasn’t BARELY out of our way it was SEVEN BLOCKS out of our way and we didn’t get back home until mid-afternoon. OOPS. We did catch a lot of Pokémons though, so obviously it was worth it. I actually noticed on the weekend that I’ve lost a lot of the fatness I gained in my face at the start of this pregnancy, and I’m still eating fries basically all the time so I’m definitely crediting it to the 25 extra kilometers I’ve walked in the past week playing this game. Thanks, Pokémon!
Anyway we still had to tape everything so we did that and then threw this half-a-can of ancient primer I had (I think from when I made my mushroom table? so like YEARS ago) up on the walls. We were able to do almost a full coat on every wall. Now, at this point we still didn’t have the actual paint yet so once the priming was done I sent Taylor over to the antique-filled hardware store to get a can, because they still had paint, right? NOPE. They were actually out of the pastel base needed to make the off-white colour we were using! Perfect. I looked online and there was only one other store downtown that carried that brand and it had already closed for the day AND was closed all day on Sundays. The next closest store was over the bridge on West Broadway and was closing in just 20 minutes, so I quickly called to confirm they had the right base (they had 50 gallons in stock so no worries there) and figured Taylor could go in a Car To Go the next morning to pick it up.
Just to make sure there were no mistakes I texted him the name & number of the paint colour, as well as the name, number and finish of the paint base. I really wanted to be sure he got the right one since we will also be using it to do touch ups in Sym’s new room, which is of course already painted the same colour. The one I wanted was a non-toxic zero VOC (volatile organic compound) paint with built-in primer, which I figured would take less coats and allow us to move Gwen into the room more quickly, as well as definitely for sure being an exact match with the other room. And I texted him LITERALLY every piece of information he needed, so like what could go wrong? Well I will tell you what could go wrong is HE WOULD JUST GET THE WRONG DAMN PAINT. The colour and finish were right but it was in a different base with NO built-in primer. Normally I don’t like to complain about husband stuff on here but this was SO FRUSTRATING, especially because when I said “This isn’t the right one” he just basically shrugged his shoulders and was like “idk this is what the guy sold me when I asked for this colour in eggshell.” UM I TEXTED YOU MORE INFORMATION THAN THAT WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST SHOW THE GUY THE TEXT STOP ACTING LIKE YOU WERE POWERLESS IN THIS PAINT BUYING SITUATION. We actually had a kind-of real fight about it which seems silly but I can excuse myself by reason of being pregnant.
I was also worried that one gallon of this primerless paint wouldn’t be enough to cover the existing green paint (it was a light green but still darker than the off white we were putting over it), and he’d have to go back for more, so REALLY I was looking out for him. Thankfully the half-assed coat of old primer we’d done the day before actually did the trick and we were able to get full coverage over the green, although it did take three coats (four for the edging). But it’s all done now, with about 1/5 of the can left for touch-ups (still hopeful it will match the existing paint well enough), and today I’m going to pull off the tape and we can start moving Gwen into her new space! She has been very excited about this whole process, “helping” with the painting until she got bored and choosing which side of the room she wants her bed on and which side is for the baby’s crib. I was a little worried she’d be flipped out about moving rooms but I think it’s going to be just fine.