Home Improvement Sucks

Painted the bathroom yesterday… badly, as it is a season of home improvements for The Lady and I. With the arrival of new furniture and the prospect of visitors, we’ve decided to get all growed up and start living like adults. That means doing things like vacuuming and dusting on the regular, and tending to The Lady’s reasonable requests of handy manly chores…. like painting the bathroom.

Now, for anyone reading this thinking “Hey, my bathroom needs painting as well.” STOP! Don’t do it. It sucks really hard, and is only recommended if you’d like to spend your weekend trapped in home improvement stores, crouching behind a toilet and snapping at your betrothed for no reason. If this sounds like fun to you here are a few easily followed steps:

1: Procrastinate for weeks while your wife gently reminds you of the task at hand. Warning: not all Ladys are as patient as mine. If your’s is of the less tolerant sort, you may want to skip this step, but for me it’s the way to go.
2. Visit every hardware store in your neighborhood. Make sure you do this in shitty weather; preferably a cold windy rain that spits in your face as you fumble with swatches and how to brochures because you are such an educated consumer.
3. Poorly think out your color choice. If you have a tan sink and tub obviously a good choice would be brown. No, not a subtle light brown. How about a dark chocolatey brown. Great choice for lighting especially if your bathroom has no windows.
4. Embarrassedly admit to a store employee that you have no idea what you’re doing, and need help. Have this notion reinforced as he politely informs you that everything you picked out was wrong. Lower your head in shame as he will decide on the proper tools. Note- letting him pick out your color is also an option, but unfortunately one that this author chose not to opt for.
5. Get ready to leave the store, and get to work when your Lady reminds you of the thousands of new matching fixtures, trinkets and do dads that need to be painstakingly sought out, fought about, and wind up being out of stock because of course they are. Note- there is no opt out for this step. The Lady will expect full cooperation. Un compliance may result in complete forfeiture of the entire project. Note- the author accepts zero responsibility for what some may decide to do with this information.
6. Finally get home and realize you have to remove all the old fixtures before you start. Make sure you’ve previously misplaced the correct screwdriver, and make due with whatever you find. Get really pissed off as you strip the screw heads, and wind up yanking them out with a pliers.
7. Now realize that you will be painting in the dark, because you removed the light fixture, but are waaaay over confident about your ability to over-come this with an old shop light that has the lighting capacity of bic lighter.
8. Start painting. Make sure to haphazardly get paint on the ceiling and moldings. This will make the decision on whether or not to paint those surfaces as well much easier.
9. Get way over confident on your ability not to drip paint on the floor. When you move the ladder decide that it’s not necessary to bring your drop cloths along too. Make sure to regret this decision later while googling “How to remove paint from tile floors and toilets”.
10. The next hour or two will be mostly pleasant as you are blissfully unaware of the carnage you are creating. Have fun here!
11. At approximately 11pm you will find yourself on the floor crouched behind the toilet asking yourself if your arm is supposed to bend that way. It isn’t.
12. Finally by midnight somehow you’ve managed to get paint pretty much everywhere you were supposed to (and where you weren’t). Start cleaning up. Now notice all the floor drips you were so sure didn’t happen. Exclaim a loud angry “Mother fucker!”. Clean up what you can. Start googling.
13. Wake up the next day, and notice the tell tale spots where the old paint bleeds thru. Exclaim “Mother fucker!”, and come to grips with the fact the you will be doing this all again next weekend putting on a second coat.
14. Pay someone else to do this. Actually this should be number 1.

Regretfully yours,
http://PoorlyThoughtOutThoughts.wordpress.com