It's been a full week - full of painting that is. I have bonded with a gallon of Behr Titanium White and a paint roller so much that I dance and sing with them in my dreams of late.
Somebody has been sniffing way too many paint fumes!
But it does speak softly to me during the day as it swishes along my cabinets trying to cover decades of worn out stain and varnish. It happily covers old and dark and replaces it with a fresh color of brilliance. One half of my kitchen seems bigger; the other half seems dreary and closed in.
I know - I did a test on my whole family and that's what THEY said.
What I have learned so far is that this project is NOT going as fast as I had anticipated. I thought I would be a lot further than this. But what is holding the whole process up is the amount of paint I have to apply to cover years of crap and bad interior design. Who the hell thought that dark wood went well in a small kitchen is beyond me. I figured a good coat of primer and a good coat of paint, and I would be well on my way to a kitchen I could live with for awhile.
NOPE!
It is taking my 4-5 coats per shelf, cabinet wall, cabinet front, and anything else that resembles the same color as stuff left behind in my cats litter box. My arms hurt and my back got a kink in it so bad yesterday that I my other psychosomatic personality-self swore I had lung cancer or something.
THEN I took a break and went to Lowe's to price out cabinetry hardware.
HOLY STINKING CA-CA!!
I have a combination of 32 cabinet handles and drawers, and at an average of $3.99 a piece per hardware, I'm gonna be shucking somewhere in the neighborhood of $127.00 just to open my damn drawers and cabinets.
So, I was thinking of making the kids make paper-mache' drawer pulls and handles instead. It would be creative at least.
Then I get an email regarding the metal tiles I want to do. I have an area of 73 x 19 1/2" that need to be tiled. My tiles are gonna cost $400.00 before shipping.
My husband came up with the idea of doing "Tin" at $19.95 a sheet behind the stove. Trust me when I say that the stuff looks a LOT better in the photog than in person. Think of cleverly molded cardboard that has been spray painted in chrome!
Oh God help me when he gets involved in these things. He loves to be creative, but when it comes to shelling out the George Washington's on this stuff, he would rather tack up something like aluminum foil and call it "art" instead.
"Look honey, I 'drew' tiles on it for you! Looks the same doesn't?", he will gleefully say with one of those frozen stupid clown looks on his face as I'm passed out on the kitchen floor, while the kids are frantically calling 911 because my heart has ceased to function at that point.
I wonder if Habit For Humanity carries any of these things?
I can't even get the kitchen painted because the wood is sucking up all the stinking primer and paint like a sand pit in the Sahara, I now I am faced with bankruptcy over the price of just the "little" things I want to add to these walls.
Did I dare mention the little tinkily glass tiles in this beachy-meets-Mediterranean theme that I want to do behind the sink? I think I'll be robbing a bank for that expense.
What the hell happened to everything getting cheaper because of the housing crisis? I thought Home Depot was practically giving stuff away cause no one is building anything anymore.
Apparently I live on the wrong planet these days, cause nothing in the home improvement department has gotten any cheaper that I've noticed. Either that or they are getting some sort of stimulus package that says home improvement stores get a gazillion dollars because no one is building anything anymore.
THAT is why nothing is on sale there, and it's left me freaking out over the price of this so-called remodeling job.
Did I mention that I went to Publix supermarket yesterday and took one of those blood pressure testy things that sit in the pharmacy section of the grocery store? I have had the most perfect blood pressure for as long as I can remember; even through all of my pregnancies. My blood pressure has finally hit the "your head is about to blow off and you are going to die in 10 seconds" meter reading - all because of this remodeling venture.
Now that all my foodstuffs are laying in bins all over the kitchen floor, and my countertops have disappeared under items that have given the rest of the family amnesia, except me, when it comes to knowing where they go.....
I HAVE A BIRTHDAY PARTY TO PLAN IN TWO DAYS THAT HAPPENS ON JULY 4TH!!
My 3 year old baby Nia is turning four on the 4th. Yes, we have not just one, but two celebrations we must joyfully acknowledge, even though I feel like ingesting NyQuil instead and hiding under my bed until Monday comes.
Because it falls on the 4th, the child has grown up thinking that every year, we give her a sky full of fireworks as one of her birthday presents. She thinks we love her the best since none of the other kids get this on their birthday, except for the sparklers we have now broken down to buy on everyone else's birthday BECAUSE she gets fireworks every year.
So Nia has serious expectations every freaking year that we have absolutely NO control of unless we contact city council and threaten to sue because we can't possibly afford these kind of fireworks in the event we move to another country like........ Istanbul, Turkey. Istanbul does NOT do fireworks on the 4th of July!
Seriously, I MUST give this child a reality check in the next few years.
If it weren't for the fact that I have to put so many coats of paint on these cabinets, all the birthday shopping and preparations would be done and I'd be just relaxing until Saturday's events.
But NoooooOOOOOOooooooo!
I am going to do the usual of exhausting myself into a coma this weekend, and end if off with a massive migraine Sunday night, that leaves me sporting about 20 acupuncture needles in my head, and gobbling down five different types of herbs, topped off with an Advil, because it's what's in my medicine cabinet this month.
But at least my baby girl will have a big smile on her face this weekend and I will suck up any pain and suffering I feel in order to make July 4th her special day - complete with ALL the fireworks she can handle at the beach. Because that is what I, as a mother, does for my child regardless of how I feel or what's going on around me.
Cause there will be NO suffering on birthdays around here.
There will be time to collapse - on my own time - later.
So for one day this week, because of my little girl, I will completely forget that the kitchen even exists. I will not model paint drops on my arms and hands like it's a cheap fashion statement. Nor will my head swirl from the endless paint fumes I have breathed in.
I will take her to the water park and play endlessly with her in the hot summer sun, watch her open her presents while wrapping paper and cardboard boxes fly haplessly across the floor, then laugh as she shoves mounds of her favorite strawberry ice cream-filled cake in her mouth.
Ooooh, my fat cells are screaming for joy as I write!
Paint and kitchen hardware will be the furthest from my mind and my blood pressure will finally return to normal.
Thank God for kids!
