Pain’t that a shame

My wife and I moved to our house in Acton last summer, so as you can imagine, we have spent the last 10 months chipping away at making a 9 year old home new to us.

Personally, I wanted to keep it simple, such as, making a coffee table out of beer empties. You know from the ‘Frat House Collection’ at Consumers Distributing? I figure we can finish off the whole house with a poster of ‘Winger’ in the bedroom and a dart board in the kitchen. Turns out that doesn’t go over well when company comes over, or so I’ve been told.

Indeed my wife and I have a different approach when it comes to home decor. I wanted to put a tiki-bar in the backyard and my wife wanted to paint the main level. So we negotiated and decided to paint the main level.

As for the paint colours, here’s what “we” decided.

-Gray or is it Grey? Regardless, my wife says it’s called “Film Festival” for the living and dining room
-Beige…sorry “Outback” for the hallway
-Blue …sorry “Moon Mist” for Travis’ room
-Blue-gray/grey…sorry “Ice-cream” for Rory’s room

We’re about half way though and our home looks somewhat like a construction site right now. Bed sheets, paint chips and screwdrivers all over the place, and by screwdrivers I mean vodka and orange juice.

When it comes to painting, my wife and I have a pretty decent way to tackle it, and it’s worked for years. We are practically experts when it comes to this sort of stuff and belive me, we’ve had practice (we’ve had 4 homes in 7 years). Here is how it goes down: my wife does the trim, I do the rolling and the kids play drums with the paint cans and stir sticks.  And therein lies the problem, the kids and the drumming.  One Sunday afternoon my eldest guy Travis decided to take a paint can…scratch that, his “snare drum” upstairs. Five minutes later half a gallon of beige paint (sorry “Outback”) is all over his bedroom carpet. Instantly my wife and I go into panic mode. We were so rushed in trying to clean it up, that we grabbed the milk bag holder and used it as a scooper. To be honest it didn’t work well…it’s like trying to drain a tub with a frying pan.

We did eventually get most of the paint off the carpet and because I’m so cheap I put it right back into the can. I figure if there’s the 5 second rule for dropped food, there must be a 10 minute rule for spilled paint.

Unfortunately, there is still a slight stain but vinegar and water can just about clean any stain. It’s like vinegar is from the heavens…or the grocery store. The only question remaining was how the heck did a paint can open just from being tipped over? We figured this was going to go down as one of life’s great mystery’s…like Loch Ness, Bigfoot or Sudoku. We thought maybe one day Geraldo Rivera would do a special on this mysterious paint can. Then the following weekend when we brought out the paint again, our mystery was solved. Believe it or not, we caught our 2 year old jimmying open the paint with an action figure’s little plastic hand. Ahh now it all makes sense, he must have loosened it and when Travis knocked it over, it all came pouring out.

Needless to say, we now keep the paint on a high shelf, right next to the screwdrivers, and by screwdrivers I mean vodka and orange juice.

**** I didn’t take a picture of the spilled paint, so I decided to post a picture of The Wiggles…”Toot Toot, Chugga Chugga, Spilled Beige Paint”