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This looks much easier in a montage
May. 30th, 2010 05:35 pmIt's been a short three days since we closed on the house, and Whitney and I sentenced ourselves to a weekend's hard labour. Being one of the most sedentary living creatures, it was a genuine workout for me, and I'm frankly glad to see a sofa again. We trekked out on a journey of two buses dragging a suitcase that anyone would have thought belonged to Mr. Bean, containing a change of clothes, a lamp, a fan, and other bits and pieces, to do some painting and other work to the house before we really move in three weeks. I don't think I've been on my feet for that long... ever, actually.
I wrote this list down on a Post-It note while we were heading out on the bus. These were the things that we should do before moving in, and we weren't actually expecting to get everything done this weekend, but through some superhuman power (and by just getting a lot more efficient as we quickly learned how to paint), we did much more than I was expecting to accomplish. The list says:
...and we managed to get all but two of those out the way. The first objective, the installation of the ceiling light, failed when we opened the cover up and discovered two wires mummified in black electrical tape like morbid maypoles, with no colour coding or other way of identifying them. I tried phoning a couple of nearby electricians to see if one of them had half an hour spare to identify the wires, but none phoned me back. We also left the guest bedroom door unpainted and un-put up, because we found that even though the sellers had obligingly left it in the basement, the hinges were missing.
We blazed through the other tasks, though - after taping off and painting the skirting boards on the guest bedroom and the entire master bedroom, it was clear that we were in danger of running out of tape by the time we went to bed on the inflatable mattress. During the night, Whitney hit on the idea of just transferring the tape from the bedrooms once the paint had dried on them, and in the morning, the lowest budget painting operation in the world continued in the living room with the reuse of all the tape from the walls and ceiling of the two bedrooms. I'm not sure how it happened, but we did three entire rooms (having done a first coat on one room already) in under 24 hours, and used only three tins of paint out of the eight that we'd bought.
After the paint had dried, we also managed to put together the second light fixture, which had a position on the wall that was correctly colour-coded. Here, it's just a matter of matching black, white and bare wires together, then twisting them together with sort of screw-cap things, and stuffing the whole tangle back into the wall. The light worked - but the real test of how successful we were will be seeing if the house has burned to the ground by the time we go back.
( In the meantime, here are some post-paint photos )
I wrote this list down on a Post-It note while we were heading out on the bus. These were the things that we should do before moving in, and we weren't actually expecting to get everything done this weekend, but through some superhuman power (and by just getting a lot more efficient as we quickly learned how to paint), we did much more than I was expecting to accomplish. The list says:
- Put up light fixture
Curtain brackets offCoat 2 for guest roomTape trim guest roomTape bedroomTape living roomGo to supermarketPaint trim guest room- Paint doors
Put up screensPaint bedroomPaint living room- Put up fixture 2
...and we managed to get all but two of those out the way. The first objective, the installation of the ceiling light, failed when we opened the cover up and discovered two wires mummified in black electrical tape like morbid maypoles, with no colour coding or other way of identifying them. I tried phoning a couple of nearby electricians to see if one of them had half an hour spare to identify the wires, but none phoned me back. We also left the guest bedroom door unpainted and un-put up, because we found that even though the sellers had obligingly left it in the basement, the hinges were missing.
We blazed through the other tasks, though - after taping off and painting the skirting boards on the guest bedroom and the entire master bedroom, it was clear that we were in danger of running out of tape by the time we went to bed on the inflatable mattress. During the night, Whitney hit on the idea of just transferring the tape from the bedrooms once the paint had dried on them, and in the morning, the lowest budget painting operation in the world continued in the living room with the reuse of all the tape from the walls and ceiling of the two bedrooms. I'm not sure how it happened, but we did three entire rooms (having done a first coat on one room already) in under 24 hours, and used only three tins of paint out of the eight that we'd bought.
After the paint had dried, we also managed to put together the second light fixture, which had a position on the wall that was correctly colour-coded. Here, it's just a matter of matching black, white and bare wires together, then twisting them together with sort of screw-cap things, and stuffing the whole tangle back into the wall. The light worked - but the real test of how successful we were will be seeing if the house has burned to the ground by the time we go back.
( In the meantime, here are some post-paint photos )
