painty (SB Day 1)

I think I am going to try to blog about each day of my Spring Break. That way, in the future when work is getting to be a bit too much and the days are never ending, I can quickly look back and remember that I did have a break once, and here's what I did. Maybe it will also encourage me to be more intentional with my days right now, as I'm living them, so that I have more interesting things to write about than reality TV and sleeping.

So yesterday, Day 1, was Painting Day. Yippee-freakin'-doo. But Erika, you may ask. Why would you need to paint? Didn't you just move in to that house and didn't you spend like the entire summer of 2009 painting it? Are you that bad at picking colors?

And to you, skeptical blog reader, I say: Yes, yes we did just paint it. And no, I am absolutely awesome at picking paint colors so don't even suggest otherwise. The problem is, I am evidently bad at picking paint. Despite the fact that I have painted no less than 123,291 rooms in my lifetime (barely an exaggeration. I paint EVERY ROOM of EVERY HOUSE I live in, rental apartments in college included...and sometimes I redecorate and repaint halfway through a rental...no lie), I have apparently learned nothing about properly selecting paint. Well, that's not entirely true. I did learn, from our last house, that you should definitely not get cheap with your kitchen/bath paint. High humidity/steam can totally wreck conventional paint. So at least in this house I bought the proper (read: super expensive) paint for the kitchen and bathrooms, which has been worth every penny. However, for the rest of the house...I don't know what I was thinking. The colors are great. The paint BLOWS.

Which brings me to the dining room. The paint in there has been scuffed/scratched/dinged since...oh, like 3 days after we moved in. Since the door to our backyard is in that room, Lola spends a good amount of time staring out the window and bumping into/scratching the walls in there (not to mention the chairs scraping the walls, etc). Unfortunately, since I picked crappy paint, we haven't been able to fix anything, so it just looks like a herd of wild animals regularly attack the walls in there...which is more or less true, but do the walls really need to make it so obvious? Now, the dining room is certainly not the only room in the house that needs a new coat of paint, but it is the smallest (with low ceilings) and I figured it would be the most manageable to handle on my own. So that was the plan for Monday of Spring Break 2011. You can take your beach trips to PCB or wherever, trendy Spring Breakers...I am painting my dining room!! Someone pass me a margarita...it's getting wild up in here!

I picked a color slightly darker than the old color because I am lazy and didn't want to have to prime, and because I LIKE SATURATED COLORS ON MY WALLS. I have never been afraid of the paint other people think will be too dark. Maybe I will give you a glimpse of some of my past bolder projects in a minute. 

Let me take a minute first and complain that I have CAMERA ISSUES. My regular (newest) camera has more or less died. I dug out our old camera and it works about 25% of the time, but not well. So these "new" pictures are  not good because something is wrong with the old camera. Oh, and also because I am not a photographer, but that is beside the point. Oh, and this is also my first attempt at using Pixlr and obviously I had no idea what I was doing. I just wanted a side by side comparison, but whatev.

In case you can't tell, the "after" is the smaller, inset picture. Obviously the two pictures were taken in different lighting, since it doesn't even look like the table/chairs are the same color (they are), but you get the idea. Basically, it's brown. Browner than it used to be. I like it. 


I can't remember if I've show y'all the "after" of our china cabinet. We just recently got both pieces finished up and moved in (and then moved out to paint, and then moved back in), and I haven't really finished decorating the hutch yet, but I snapped a pic so you can get the idea. Remember how it started last summer?

Here's what we have now (sorry for the bad angle):

Um...I would try to get a better angled picture, but the table is kinda in my way.


I didn't use painter's tape this time, since I wanted to attempt trimming/cutting in like the pros do it. I found out I'm not a pro, but whatever. However, I did at least tape off the archway between the kitchen/dining room because I didn't want to accidentally mar the green paint on the underside of the arch (you can sorta see the arch in the inset picture in that first photo). However, when I took off the tape...well, I succeeded in not marring the green paint with my new brown paint. But the TAPE was a major fail because it friggin PULLED OFF HUNKS OF GREEN PAINT!!!

And I am mad as fire and ready to sue the Blue Tape company because isn't the whole POINT of that tape to help your paint job and not wreck your old paint job and force you to go find the can of green paint so that you can do touch-ups that should not even be NECESSARY?? Right, I thought so too. So, Blue Tape company (I need to find out WHICH company so that I can properly smear them in this very public forum)...you suck.


So, Day 1, done and done. Today it is raining and I have big plans of updating the checkbook spreadsheets, paying bills, couponing, and grocery shopping. I know, you wish you could be on Spring Break with me so that you could be as exciting as me. It's a common sentiment.


Also, I entered a sweepstakes yesterday (I do that like it's my full-time job and ONE DAY I'm going to win, so boo-yah) and I got one free music download as a parting prize...well, let's just say that I haven't downloaded a song since...college? I certainly do not have iTunes or anything like that, or an mp3 player or phone or whatever...I am just not very musically advanced. I can operate a CD player, however. So I am overwhelmed by the burden of selecting a song to download. One song! I can't waste this! Since I don't know what music people are listening to these days, I need help...what one song should I download?