Kathy's Big Adventure: Coloring My World

Even though I don't really mind sleeping on the floor and doing dishes in the bathroom, the other day we got to thinking that it might be fun to finish something in the house other than the home theater and multi-room stereo system. Since the mudroom is small and it's use clearly defined, we decided it was a good place to start. Have you ever played that game where everyone takes off their shoes and makes a big pile out of them in the middle of the room? Someone says 'GO', everyone runs to the pile and the first person to find their shoes and put them on is the winner? Our mudroom reminded me of that game. Anyway. We'd virtuously saved some of the 100-something year old lumber* from the house's original kitchen and turned it into a really heavy shelving unit using ski boots to determine the space between the shelves. We got a ceiling light with a metal cage around the bulb so we shouldn't break anymore light bulbs with our skis and I painted the walls the same happy happy blue that my friend Tina used to paint her kitchen. I was positive that the blue was the perfect color for that space until I saw our neighbor Nancy's yellow mudroom but then after a few days I decided again that the blue was perfect. I don't know why I obsess so about paint colors when it's not that hard paint over a color that looks way different on a whole wall than it did on a little chip.

More on painting.

So you have the unfinished baseboard nailed to the wall. It needs priming and two coats of paint. But the wall is already painted and the floor is finished which means you can't let the paint can't get anywhere but on the baseboard because if you get it on the painted wall you have to paint that part of the wall again and when you do that you you'll likely get wall paint on the baseboard that will then have to be painted over again. Then, if you get paint on the floor, you can't paint over it because the floor isn't painted. The paint just soaks in and looks ugly. Ceiling painting problems are similar to baseboard painting problems except everything is overhead with a ladder which adds to the normal discomfort that goes along with just plain painting.

We got a price to paint the ceilings and baseboards in the Vermont house. The price was 3 times what we thought it would be and 5 times what we wanted it to be.

Stalemate.

It took a couple days and several attempts to get rogue paint glops off of the concrete floor for us to decide that having someone paint the baseboards and ceilings was worth almost any amount of money.

Ceiling and baseboard painters

Holiday News:

• Vin an I did our Christmas the other night. A pile of priority mail envelopes holding surprises were arranged around the bottom of a bulbed coat tree that served as our balsam fir. I made a pizza and wore a skirt that kind of hid the watermelon that used to be my knee when it wasn't riding up the front of my tights with static electricity. Halfway through the ceremony, Vince surprised me with 'LOST, season 3' and then I surprised him 'LOST, season 3.

Our Christmas coat rack. For at least 20 years, my high school (long-time!!) friend Linda has given me one of these hand-blown glass ornaments from Sun Valley at Christmas. Actually, she forgot this year. "Linda! Where's my ornament?"

• Since we hadn't seen our O'Connell niece and nephew for the holidays, Vin and I recently drove to Boston to treat them to a special post holiday-time dinner. I found a Zagat's 5-star vegetarian eatery that sounded incredible. It ended up not only being vegetarian....but vegan. And not only vegan...but raw. Vin ordered pizza and was surprised when it came with a...somehow dried because it couldn't be baked and still be considered raw...cracker crust. My sister-in-law asked to have her portobello soup heated up a bit and they couldn't/wouldn't because raw-law states that nothing can be over 102 degrees. Luckily a banana-chocolate shake (make that 2) fit all the 'raw' rules and supplemented our 15 year old meat-eating snowboarder nephew's raw-vegan sushi. If we'd been raw diners I'm sure we would have given the place 5 stars but we're not raw diners.