But Soft...

I don’t know where you live, but it has been unseasonably cold around here lately – I bet it was only like 45 degrees last night! Or more like 55. Or maybe 60?

I don’t know what the heck degrees it was, but I know that as soon as I got out of bed this morning I had to run around closing all the windows. Which would have been a smart thing to do before I got into bed last night, so I wouldn’t have wound up suffocating myself with my pillows over my head to keep warm (because that’s so much easier than getting up for another blanket), and I wouldn’t have slept through the alarm clock (because two big downy pillows over your head do tend to muffle noise), so I wouldn’t have lost an hour this morning, which wouldn’t have funked up my whole routine, so I would have been out of the shower long before just this very second (okay, ten minutes; I’m not still wet or anything), and I wouldn’t have had to skip my watermelon-and-“Big Love” Tuesday lunchbreak.

If only there were some modern-type device to tell a gal ahead of time what the weather’s going to be, so she could plan ahead and shut her windows…

But hey, at least it’s not like there’s any heat that’s going to go kicking itself on and warming up the entire eastern seaboard!

Anyway, I shut all the windows and I got my coffee and I sat down at my desk and I thought “Now why's it still so cold in here? And why does it still sound like there’s a window open somewhere?”

Ummmm, could it be this giant gaping hole where your front door’s supposed to be?

Oh! Goody! Crap! You scared me! I thought you had gone back to England, or taken the vow, or died or something. Balls. I mean, nice to see you, how've you been...?

Turns out there is a magical modern device that predicts weather, and it seems to think it might get warm again someday, but in the meantime autumn approacheth, and it mightn’t be a bad idea to have a front door to greet it at when it arrives.

If I hung the blasted thing back up unfinished, Johnny would kill me. (Actually, no he wouldn't. I’d fight him off with photos of the bathroom he’s left half-done for going on a year now. He would be powerless against me…) But Goody would kill me for sure. And, if I were any kind of prudent girl, I'd kill myself.

So I did it. Okay? Are you happy? I finished stripping the g-d door.

Sort of.

I got all the paint off the flat parts, but I’d been admonished – under penalty of death – to get the heat gun nowhere near the panes of glass. Because this is what happens when you get heat guns too near glass:

(Which is also why you never bother to finish stripping that particular piece of window hardware, which you had to leave in place because it wouldn’t come off no matter which screwdriver you used – and, now that you think of it, maybe you broke that glass when you tried to use the power drill attachment and it slipped, and you only told Johnny that you broke it with the heat gun, but, at any rate -- what was my point?)

Oh, yeah: replacing glass in this door is much more complicated than replacing it in a window (which, as you can see, we’re right on top of), so don’t Fugger it up.

So I had to leave the near-the-glass bits the way I found them.

If it’s up to me, I don’t care if they just get sanded and painted over, but I’m sure Johnny will have some big complicated process for doing it “the right way.” Which is the other reason I quit when I did. Because, believe it or not (and you know me, so form your own opinions), I was actually planning on sanding down the door after stripping it this afternoon (or, actually, I was planning on doing it this morning, but old marshmallow-head changed the plans on that one).

But the more I thought about it, I wasn’t sure that was the right next step. And I hate sanding more than anything. And if I sanded it down today, only to have Johnny tell me I had to do something else to it and then sand it down again, I might’ve taken this thing to them both:

And so help me, Goody, if you say one word about the "g-d door" comment I made up there, I'm coming for you next...

A Little Bit Crunchy...

So I went back to stripping the g-d door. This time I chose the Klezmatics to listen to (because I am, at heart, an angry Jew)…

I’d forgotten, from when I stripped the first half or so of this door (because it was, ahem, not exactly yesterday), that this paint comes off in strips – really, Tara, like a sunburn! And I didn’t even have to put it in the crockpot. Just put the heat gun on it (and find the proper tool to get it started) and shwoop – whole big sheets!

Like this:

Now, the reason it comes off in whole big sheets is also the reason those sheets have that pretty golden color on the back of them: there’s a layer of shellac on under there.

Which is nice, in that it does make the paint come mostly off in those big sheets. But annoying in that the not-mostly parts leave random spots like this:

That shmear like this:

when you try to scrape them off. Which is why it's a good thing I'm not trying to take this back down to wood.

I'm not. Right, Goody?

No, Prudence, just paint it...

Do you know what else? When I hit this door with 750 degrees of heat gun, I got a yummy smell like at the fair. Which means there’s either beetles in the fried dough, lead in the clam fritters, or pine sap in the cotton candy. Or else that's not shellac at all but candy-apple crap.

I’m thinking the beetle theory sounds most likely, it being the state fair and all.

And on that note, I’m calling it quits for the afternoon. Johnny just went to “play his numbers,” so I’m going to take my traditional day-off lunch break that I didn’t get earlier: a half a watermelon and an episode of “Big Love” on demand.

Hey, maybe tomorrow I’ll be an angry Mormon! Except I don’t think I own any Donny & Marie.

I sure as hell hope I don’t own any Donny & Marie…

Goldilocks and the Wee Bear

I've started stripping this door:

Except I'm doing it in the back hallway.

I'll write more about it later, but I had to sneak in here and just tell you that it is not going well.

I got myself all set up with the extension cord and the heat gun, the boom box and Stand! by Sly & the Family Stone (because, at heart, I am an angry black man) -- only to discover that my secret special stripping tools (which are not actually stripping tools at all but they're what I've been using for -- say it with me -- two freaking years) went missing somewhere in this past month of flurry-scurry, move-things-around-a-lot-to-get-them-out-of-this-or-that-person's-way, but-still-not-get-anything-done.

So I got mad and shouty, which made Johnny mad and shouty (because oh, yeah, the job fell through so he's home with me on my day off, which is always a good thing), until I gave up and decided to use the crappy plastic tool I bought back when I still thought citrus stripper might actually work (I also used to think you could get high smoking banana peels -- you try something once, you make a big mess and throw up a little bit -- you learn a lesson about fruit).

The crappy plastic tool folds like a limp carrot when the heat gun hits it. So more mad and shouty from me...

Now he's in the basement -- instead of doing all the stuff he was supposed to do today -- digging through every bucket of everything, determined to find me either my tool (which I've given up on) or something I can use instead. Every five minutes or so he comes up and hands me something, which is either too hard or too soft, too sharp or too dull, and stands over my while I try it out, so I feel obliged to keep using it at least until he walks away.

Thank you honey, this one's just right...

I've got six or seven of them strewn about me now, I've been at this for an hour, and I'm not even 1/4 of the way through it yet.

There's no way I'm finishing this job today...

End Note

Johnny's home. I told him.

He says: "I don't like those kind of surprises." But otherwise he's okay with it.

He doesn't know about my obsession with the Dirty Jobs guy, though, so ix-nay on the ush-cray.

Phee-YEW!

And so that's where I was when I started posting.

Came home, emptied it out, cleaned it up, it's okay. We'll use it again for food. I figure my hands were in all that gunk as well, and I'm sure as heck gonna be putting food in them.

I learned that fingernails don't peel the paint off quite as nicely as they do skin off a sunburn -- but you know what does?

Girly screwdriver.

Well, Girly screwdriver, steel wool, and elbow grease. Not, altogether, any easier than using 5F5, but nicer somehow. I'd love to show you a picture of how the things came out but, you know, I didn't have time to get the batteries.

All that I have left to do are the sixteen screws -- and look what I just found to watch on demand while I do those:




Hubba hubba.

Not EXACTLY Like A Sunburn

I'm gonna need a tool or two, but I see what Tara's saying.

So anyway I go pick up Johnny, bring him a beer to soften him up for the inevitable. Even if the thing's okay he's gonna be pissed that I used his crockpot without asking first.

Shoot! Did I remember to turn the damn thing down when I was home? Ah well, it's too late now...

But when he's settled in the car he says to me, "I talked to another plumber about pricing the gas job. I'm supposed to meet him up the pub. Can you drop me?"

Huzzah!

While The Bits Drain In The Colander...

Oh, hell, the colander's not twenty years old. Or I don't think it is -- or honestly that much care. At least I remembered to grab something before dumping all those brass screws down the sink...

So I got hung up at one work and hung up at the other work and by the time I'm on my way home I realize that if I'm gonna make it home first to get the shoot out of the crock pot before I go pick up Johnny, I don't have time to stop at the grocery store like I had planned.

I run over my grocery list in my mind. What did I need? Is it important? Lettuce -- eh, no salad tonight. Stuff for Work Lady #1 -- can wait until tomorrow. Earplugs for this weekend (we're going away and so I have to actually sleep with Snorey here) -- I can get them tomorrow. Batteries for the digital camera -- the bleaders will live ("bleaders" = blog readers -- I stole it from Julie Powell).

So fine, no grocery store. Get home, clean crock pot, maybe clean hinges, pick up Johnny, grocery shop tomorrow.

But when I get home there's a message on the machine:

"Hey, Horse, it's Johnny. I'm here already. So when you get home, pick me up. It's 3:30."

It's 4:45.

AAUUUGH!

Okay, The Crockpot's Gonna Live

I washed it out with vinegar (and soap, and water) and dried it with a dishtowel (something I never do) and put it right back where I found it. He'll never know. Don't tell him.

So anyway I'm at work and then by sheer coincidence the lady that I work for starts talking about she wishes she had a crockpot because if she did she could leave something simmering on low all day and--

And suddenly I'm thinking "Low? Did I turn it down to low? Or did I leave it on high?"

See, the instructions that I found on google said to set the pot on medium, but our pot doesn't have a medium, so I figured I'd set it on high until I left and turn it down. But maybe I didn't remember about that last part. In fact, I was pretty sure I didn't.

And the reason this particular crockpot doesn't have a medium --and the reason that it matters so much to Johnny -- is that it's about twenty years old. It was a gift to him from the mother of an ex-girlfriend who is now dead. The mother, that is, not the girlfriend. The girlfriend's still alive. He almost married her, the bitch.

No, I'm just kidding, I never met her and I don't care, but I've got to save this crockpot.

Maybe I should never have used it in the first place?

Shoot.

Okay, dang, I really wish I'd had time to post all of this shoot as it happened, but I didn't, because I was in a hurry, which I still am, which you'll see why, but here goes...

First of all, I got all pissed off at the old guy across the street this morning because I thought he was standing out there with his hose in his hand watering his driveway (and, despite what I may or may not have posted yesterday, I mean that literally). I could see him out there, I could smell water on the pavement, and it hasn't rained in days. Why the hell would anybody need to be watering his driveway? Not that I'm so green as to be sad about the water waste or anything. I could give a shit. I just like to get all pissed off at the neighbors.

But then I went to look through the kitchen at a better look at the asshole, and I realized that the smell was coming from the crockpot. Turns out, when you put two brass hinges in a crockpot and turn the thing on high for two and a half hours, it smells exactly -- but exactly -- like a rainstorm on hot asphalt. If you take a ddep enough snif you can even taste it. Tastes like chewing tinfoil.

That made me laugh but I couldn't post then because I was late for work.

And now I gotta go dump the crock pot out and see what we're looking at before Johnny gets home.

More later...

You're going to just have to forgive the typos, I don't have time!

Progress From The Comment Trail...

Tara said...
Cook that hardware in a crock pot...it really DOES work great! And it's fun too...the paint peels off like skin when you've gotten a bad sunburn.
August 1, 2007 8:18 AM

EGE said...
Really? In what, just water? Or dry? On high or low? And for how long? Can you still use the pot for food after? Help! I want to try and I'm too lazy to google!
August 1, 2007 8:23 AM

And then EGE said...
PS I googled it. Tune in later...
August 1, 2007 9:01 AM

And then Tara said...
I have a rule (that has been put into place far too often) around "once a kitchen tool has been used for home improvement, it doesn't go back into the kitchen"... Once you see what's in the crock pot, you probably won't want to use it for food ever again.
August 1, 2007 9:24 AM

EGE said...
Whoops. The page I found on google said the crock pot would be fine and I already threw them in. If I ruin the crock pot, Johnny's gonna KILL me...

That's what you get for doing your own research. Anybody got an old crock pot just like Johnny's that you can get to my house before he gets home from work?

Maybe it will be okay. It usually is.

NOT.

La la ...

I Forgot!

I did something yesterday!

Remember this door?



I took it off its hinges and carried it to the back hall for stripping. That's as far as I got. Oh, well, actually I took the hinges off, too. And here's how grossly humid it still is here: I could scrape the painted-in screws clean with nothing but my girly screwdriver. I planned to hit the hinges with a bit of 5F5, but I had real work I was trying to get done and I decided that was more important.

(Didn't get that exactly finished, either. But I tried and, well, horseshoes and handgrenades, I guess... )

Anyway, that doot was heavy ("doot" = typo I like so I'm keeping. As in "Doot, that doot was heavy"). Johnny said it would be, but I didn't believe him. He said there was no way I'd be able to carry it by myself, so of course I had to. I damn near put gouges in the archway and the floor, until I devised a way to carry the doot by one knob and one window, and bearing a large part of the weight on the large part of my right hip.

And then of course when I got it to the back hallway it was facing the wrong way, and this doot -- being an outside doot -- is wider than the closet doot I had been working on, so there wasn't room to turn it around, so I had to carry it back out and start again, this time on my left hip.

Very good for a wonky back, this, what?

Oh, and speaking of that other doot? I am not fretting over this one. I'm painting it. It's already been decided. But, since I half-stripped it already I've got to go whole hog, because we've already seen how good I am with patching...

Yesterday: Accomplished (I've decided to quit counting days because I only managed to rack up like ten of them in the whole month of July, and that's just shameful).
Time: 45 minutes (I know you won't believe me, but those are the heaviest freaking screws I've ever seen, and they were painted in there...)
Cost: Nothing
Getting To Play With 5F5 Today Instead Of Heat Guns Because I Finally Finished (Well, Sort Of) The Work I Was Doing Yesterday: Priceless. Oh, you don't know the half...

Day 13, Project Three: Deep Breaths

I am so proud of me!

See, I lied to you a little bit yesterday. Not about the goats or the train or about time being an endless song or anything important like all that. But I didn’t exactly fold up my house and quit in a fit of pique like I pretended.

Okay I did … but then I smoothed it out again and started over. Let me explain:

After I posted my snit yesterday, I had myself something to eat and a half hour of quiet time, at which point I was ready to allow as how I’d probably not die if I tried to accomplished something Puritanical after all. So long as, whatever I did, I could do it on the couch, while watching Scrubs reruns on Comedy Central. Preferably with a glass of wine.

And then I had an idea that was so monumentally bad even I could see the flaws -- could see them even I did it. Could see them even as I envisioned it before I so much as moved a pagan pinky. “Ooh,” I thought, “This is a bad idea.” I’d go so far as to say that it was dangerously stupid. But in the end nothing terrible happened, so I don't have to, like, take a lesson out of the experience or anything. (Still and all, I don’t see any reason why Johnny ever has to know…)

I spread some newspapers on the coffee table, threw an old t-shirt on top of them (rag bag, dwindling!), dumped the coffee can of painted hinge-parts out on top of it, donned my trusty mask and cracked the 5F5. Right there on the stained-and-varnished coffee table, over the “oriental” rug (I think it was made in Egypt, does that count?), which was itself the only thing protecting our brand-newly refinished floors.

La la...

Metal is so much easier to strip than wood is, it’s practically fun! You paint the poison on there and then watch as it just bubbles up and crawls right off the brass like a caustic little caterpillar. And then, when you’re done, you can take it to the sink and wash it to get the last bits of goo out of the corners. Look:


(And that, that it’s sitting on, is the selfsame coffee table where I stripped it. See? It’s fine.)

I like this job! I think, before I get around to stripping the other doors (and I may never get around to stripping the other doors), I’ll take all the hinges off and do them anyway. Maybe tomorrow!

No, no, Prudence. Remember what we said about planning for tomorrow? Besides, you’ve got to finish the job you started first.

Yes’m. Yes, Goody. I know.

For now, though, since I couldn’t drink the wine I wanted while I was working with the 5F5 at the coffee table (not with a mask on and everything, I couldn’t), I poured myself a glass of Menage A Trois California Red (very nice, by the way, though maybe you should take this beer-drinker’s wine review with a grain of salt). Then I sank into the cushy wing chair, watched “Creature Comforts” on the tv, and giggled to myself all warm and thick and sweet, like a big old pot of oatmeal…

Day 13: Accomplished
Time: Two episodes of “Scrubs” -- one hour exactly
Cost: Nothing (thank god)
Everybody Pinky-Swearing To Not Tell Johnny What I Did When He Gets Home: Priceless

Day 11, Project Freaking Three: The Best Laid Plans

I’ve come to the conclusion that stripping paint is a lot like writing.

You start with a nice clean white expanse (or maybe some other color if you’re in, like, kindergarten -- or California), and then with a quick first pass you turn it into a horrible disgusting mess that you’d try to hide if company popped in. With painstaking care and lots of precautionary measures, you go over it and over it and over it -- and every time you think you’re done you find another flaw. When you get so mad you’re throwing things and decide it’s going to have to just be good enough, god damn it!, you hear a little voice in the back of your head telling you it’s not, keep going. Finally you get to a point where you think it might really be good enough this time, you don’t hear the voices anymore, so you put it away and go to bed -- and wake up to a whole new batch of flaws in the morning that you just couldn’t see in the dark the night before. Finally, when you really-really think it’s actually, honestly good -- not just good enough, but good -- then, if you’re very-very lucky, someone who respects you and has only your best interests at heart will point out to you all the spots you didn’t realize that you missed. (And if they are very-very lucky, they’ll be in a different city when they do it.)

So yeah, no staining today.

I didn’t sleep well last night (psychasthenia, remember) but I managed to stay in bed until almost 8:00 anyhow. Forced myself to work until 11:30 and then rewarded myself with a half an hour of Miss Snark (which is, sadly, halted now, but I’ve been reading the back posts that I missed before I discovered that all blogs aren’t navel-gazing acts of adolescent-style angst -- just mine, apparently). Then I had to bathe the cat (she’s thrilled, but she refused to pose for pictures), and by the time I bathed myself it was 2:00 and our old neighbors Carmine and Elaine were here. Johnny and Carmine had plans to play guitar together, and Elaine wanted me to go with her to the mall or something but I, like a schmo, declined in favor of stripping the frucking door again.

See, it turns out , now that it’s dry, the bottom half of the door that I used the #3 coarse steel wool on yesterday, looks very different from the top half that I used the # whatever-it-was on Friday. I have to hit the top again so that they’ll match. And I am thrilled. In fact, this is how I feel:

(I said she didn’t pose, I never said I didn’t take her picture.)

One saving grace is that a very nice reader wrote in to suggest that I could turn my left-hand gloves inside out and use them on my right hand. That worked just swellingly, and it put a happy little jolt into my day to realize that I was going to able to get to work without having to go running any stinking errands. Until Johnny walked over with his empty prescription bottle in his hand and asked me, like a two-year-old, if he “had any more medicines somewhere.” Yes, dear, because that’s what I do: I fill your prescriptions three, four months at a time and then keep them in a secret place until you ask me. Did you not notice you were running low? Could you not have told me yesterday? Argh. He leaves for the Cape again tomorrow, and he can’t exactly go a week without blood-pressure medication, so I’ve got to go to CVS…

When I come back the phone rings because -- crap! -- because it’s 3:00 already and I emailed Charlie this morning telling her I had things to do but I would definitely be done by three and she should call me then. I let the machine pick up (because I really am an awful friend), pull my two left gloves on and my mask -- then pull off my mask and gobble a half a thing of cottage cheese because I realize I haven’t eaten anything -- and set to work.

I am this close to finished when I notice for the first time that this door is actually made out of at least two, and maybe three different kinds of wood. and may just look like crap when stained no matter what. I call Johnny in from outside for a consult and he says yup, sure enough, at least two different kinds, and adds that he knows how to make it look good but I won’t want to do it. Well, how? I certainly don’t want to go through all of this and have it still look like crap. I get enough of that with the word processor, thank you very much.

Bleach it, he says.

With what, Carmine asks. Not bleach?

Well, yeah, Johnny answers (being terribly polite for Johnny). Bleach it with bleach. It’ll take all the old stain out of it and leave it fresh and white, like new.

Now, like I said, he’s going away again first thing in the morning. If I’m going to do this without him, I have to know exactly what to do before he leaves. So I start riddling him with questions. Not straight bleach, right? Do I just pour it on or use a brush? How long do I leave it? Do I have to rinse it off? Will I need to do it more than once? How long does it have to dry? Should it be lying flat or standing up? Can I do it now or does the thinner have to be dry first? Really, straight bleach?

Turns out if you ask your husband enough annoying questions in a row about a simple project that is in his line of work, he’ll decide it’s easier to just do it himself.

It can’t be done tonight because yes, the thinner has to dry first, but he says he’ll do it first thing in the morning before he heads down to Bourne. If he does, and if it’s dry when I get home from work, then I’ll stain it tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll hit the hinges with the 5F5.

Unless, of course, I wake up and decide the whole thing’s a piece of crap, in which case I’ll re-write -- I mean re-strip -- it one more time…

Day 11: Accomplished (as it were)
Total Time: I forgot to check, because I was listening to Johnny and Carmine play guitar instead of watching a TV show or listening to a CD that I could time myself by. Let’s say an hour?
Total Cost: Nothing (thanks for the inside-out glove tip, NanaJan!)
Chances That Johnny Will Actually Get Up And Get That Thing Bleached For Me In The Morning Before He Leaves: Paltry

Day Ten, Project Three: Stripping By Numbers

I was awakened bright and early this morning by the gentle tickle of a giant spider crawling on my forehead.

This does not bode well…

I smashed him and threw him across the room, stripped my pyjamas off and freaked out for a while, then got my three hours of work and one of exercise out of the way. After all that, I tried to put on “Car Talk” to shower by, only to discover that it’s a pledge weekend on NPR.

Ja-cob Fugger!

At Blowe’s I damn near bought the variety-pack of steel wool by mistake, but realized it just in time and ran back to switch it off. Turns out they didn’t have the one I really wanted, so I got the coarsest kind. I’m sure it will be fine. [Lo and behold: for once, it was.]

Then I spent an hour and $80 in the supermarket buying, um, I guess mostly toilet paper? Sheesh. I had a whole grocery list ready but had to cross half of it off because the bills came in the mail today. Johnny gave me xyz yesterday and I did the math and planned to spend x on groceries, y on bills, and put z in the Furnace Fund. But the AmEx yearly membership came due this month (it went up, too; I didn’t know it was gonna do that), and the first electric bill came that reflects the new (to us, and hopefully temporary) water heater. Pfft, there went z. And so now I’m leaving the grocery store without my IPA, because if I hope to heat my house this winter I have to subtract from x or else end up with i…

I did the (final, forgotten) heat-gun part this morning while listening to the snippets of “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” that they played between the pledge drives (which “Wait Wait” actually airs at 12:00, so I guess it wasn’t morning). Now I’m racing to get the groceries in and the stripping crap set up before “This American Life” gets underway. Some race. 20 rolls of toilet paper, 10 yogurts and a watermelon, and all the stripping crap is where I left it yesterday. Ta da! I’m finished just in time -- my show is starting!

Shins. I’ve heard this one. Oh well, too late to change it now: I’m up to my wrists in caustic chemicals and metal shavings.

I get twenty minutes into the job and realize I forgot to buy the gloves. Nerts. Actually, I didn’t honestly forget so much as cross them off the list because I couldn’t remember anymore why they were so important (and Totino’s pizza rolls were on sale for a dollar: priorities) -- but I remember now. Boy, do I. I know why I had so many lefties and no righties, too:

5F5 + rubber gloves + #3 coarse steel wool = this:

Just call me the little match girl. Or Jack the Ripper. (Yeah, the red stuff isn’t blood, but I won’t go into that whole story until we see how the door turns out.)

Tomorrow: staining!

Day Ten: Accomplished
Total Time: Not counting Blowe’s, then all of “This Life” and really only like a fraction of “Wait Wait” because the pledge drive drove me nuts -- 70 minutes.
Total Cost: $3.86 for steel wool.
Waking Up With Spiders Crawling On Your Forehead: Psychasthenic (look it up).

Day Nine, Project Three: Requiem For A Paintbrush

Oh ugh, why did I say I’d do this? I’ve been Puritan Manifesting for just over a week, I took two measly little days off, and now I can’t bear the thought of getting back to it. Which, now that I’ve spelled it out, sounds like a pretty good reason to have said I’d do it in the first place. Lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy Jane…

I decided to listen to Mozart’s Requiem while I worked today because in the car on the way home from work I actually heard “Rock Me Amadeus” on the radio. (I’m sorry, I know people are all up in arms about it from New York to the Golden Gate, but I like my “we play everything” station (mine’s called Mike, yours might be Jack or Tom or Jeff or Billy Bob or Norbert). Yes, I know radio is supposed to be local and good but the fact is that it {isn’t} -- and if you’re lucky enough to have a good, local station, I bet you dollars to doughnuts the signal isn’t strong enough to carry you to work. The fact is, radio stations are so standardized they might as well be networked like the television. There’s a KISS in every market (playing “Go heavy go widdit” over and over and over and over again); a classic rock station and one that bills itself as “alternative” (both of which lay claim to the Clash, as Joe Strummer turns over and over again…); there’s something called “Adult Contemp” (which might as well just throw a “t” on the end there and be done with it); and then there’s talk (’nuff said). It’s all yuck, so forgive me if I get a little guilty kick out of hearing “Rock Me Amadeus,” “Devil Went Down To Georgia,” “Tie A Yellow Ribbon,” “Sweet Escape” (shoot me, but I also don’t hate Gwen Stefani) and “Walk This Way” all in a row, and showing up to work with a smile on my face.)

Now, where was I?

Oh yeah, “Rock Me Amadeus.” The Requiem is the rockingest thing old Wolfgang ever wrote, so I -- wait, I don’t own the Requiem? How do I not own the Requiem? I know I do, maybe it’s on vinyl. But I don’t have the patience to go through all those boxes in the basement right this minute. Oh well, I can’t really see substituting some deedly-dee little piano concerto, so I guess Songs of Kris Kristofferson will have to do. If “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down” doesn’t qualify as a requiem then I don’t know what does. (Maybe “Loving Her Was Easier.” Or “For The Good Times.” “Why Me,” “Bobby McGee,” “The Pilgrim”…)

So. After looking and failing and swearing, and deciding not to do this today after all, and then feeling guilty and deciding to have another look, and then another, I finally found everything I needed in the basement save a brush. That is, I could easily put my hands on about a thousand brushes, but Johnny isn’t here to tell me which to use.

Balls.

For most of you this probably doesn’t sound like a dilemma. You’re thinking this decision ought to be the easy part: pick the ugliest brush you can find to do a job that’s only going to ruin the damn thing anyway. Right? But see, Johnny does this for a living. He’s a professional painter. Every brush in this house has a name and a purpose and a history, but he’s not exactly the neatest freak I ever met. Even the brush that’s been behind the radiator in the bathroom for the past six months and has a nest of spiders living in it is not necessarily up for grabs. He may have paid $15 for it and expect it to last him five more years. Seven, if it stays behind the rad a little longer.

Even to do something as destructive as sit in 5F5 for weeks on end, Johnny goes through this whole process of selecting a brush for me to use. Then he gives me a tutorial (again) on how to clean it when I finish every day. Then he inspects it when I’m done. If I’ve left the tiniest speck of gunk in there he’ll tell me just to leave it for him to clean up from now on. So sometimes I leave a speck of gunk in there on purpose.

When I first started stripping paint a couple years ago, I didn’t feel like playing the whole choose-a-brush game, so I just went and bought myself a new one. The cheapiest-ass, plastic-bristled brush that I could find. I only planned on ruining it anyway, I figured, so who cares? It cost two dollars. I was so proud. Damn thing disintegrated as soon as I dipped it in the can. Big black blob of booger-bristles.

Anyway, Johnny’s not home and I’m not going to buy a new brush and I don’t dare choose one of his, but I’ve got to do this. Right? Yes. Yes, I do. Suddenly, I have a brainstorm: the buckets out under the porch! He claims the brushes in them will still be good someday -- and maybe they will be, if he ever gets around to cleaning them -- but in the meantime I bet he wouldn’t even remember that they’re there, let alone notice if one of them went missing.

So I pull on a pair of rubber gloves (for some reason, I find five left-hand gloves under the sink and only one righty; I’ll think about what that might mean some other time…) and I (gag) go out and (gag) retrieve a brush from the (gag) painty-moldy-turpy-leafy water it’s been marinating in for lord only knows how many months or years. Hot water and dish soap and voilá , Johnny was right, this nasty old thing’s as good as new.

If by this point you are tapping your fingers and thinking “jeez, get on with it already!”, then you can imagine how frustrated I was to be only ready to begin to work. I’d been at it for the best part of an hour now and I hadn’t actually managed to do a thing.

And you can imagine how frustrated I was when I sat down to begin and saw the eighteen-inch swath along the bottom of the door that I had somehow forgotten when I had the heat gun out the other day.

So I had get the goddamn heat gun and do that goddamn section first, and then when I finally started with the 5F5 I realized I had the wrong kind of steel wool but I goddamn used it anyway even though it didn’t really work, and then when I got to the corner of the door I realized that I’d forgotten to heat-gun the edges and, well, let’s just say I didn’t finish it today, all right?

I need a drink. I’ll finish it tomorrow. Tomorrow there’s good stuff to listen to on NPR.

Day, what? Where are we? Should I count the days I didn’t work? No? Okay. Day Nine, Then: Accomplished
Total Time Spent: Oh crap, an hour getting ready and then Kris Kristofferson one and a half times (because I couldn’t touch anything with my poison hands and didn’t have the patience to take the gloves off to choose a new CD) -- probably about two hours all together.
Total Cost: Nothing, but I’ll have to go get the proper steel wool pads tomorrow. And maybe a couple right-hand gloves.
Johnny Coming Home In The Middle Of All Of This And Not Noticing (Or At Least Not Mentioning) That I Stole A Brush From Him: Priceless

Day Eight, Project Three: Girdles Aweigh!

“Girdles Aweigh!” is the name of the fifth song on side two of this album, which I thought would be a particularly appropriate soundtrack for the job at hand:


Actually, for some reason I woke up this morning wanting to listen to Dolly Parton’s The Grass Is Blue -- a mostly bluegrass but a little bit gospel-y album that came out about ten years ago -- but my copy of it has been missing for so long it’s barely even a memory to me now. So I figured burlesque was the next best thing.

So anyway, yeah, I finally got down to brass tacks on the door this morning. Johnny’s off for who-knows-how-long and I don’t work on Tuesdays, so as soon as I showered I set to. Didn’t even put a bra on. Why bother, when I’m only stripping anyway, right? Ba-dump bump. (Heh. The burlesque must be rubbing off on me already. Which is better than me rubbing up on the burlesque, I’ll tell you that much. Ba-dump bump. Thank you ladies and germs, I’ll be here all week. Oh, I don't even know what that last joke means...)

I decided to do it in the hallway after all, even though the sun is shining. I realized (and again I must say: duh) that the breeze we always have out there would blow the paint chips all over the world, and they must be toxic somehow even if by some miracle they don’t have any lead. I don’t want Johnny to come home and find out I killed his squirrels. Or the scary-noise making raccoons. Or the stray cats I’ve been feeding. Or the coyotes, if there really are coyotes…

So anyway, I stripped inside. Makes more sense anyway because that back hallway has a door so you can close it off from the rest of the house, a screen door at the other end, and one wall is all windows. You’re practically outside back there after all of that, except with the added bonus of conveniently located electrical sockets. And not regular-old, Bertha-style sockets either. These ones actually work, they have three prongs and everything, and you can plug in the heat gun and the radio and you won’t blow a fuse. It’s like a freakin’ party!

Oh, balls. Except for the three extra pieces of blueboard from when we built this very hallway three years ago, which are still leaning up against the wall, blocking the sockets. We’re keeping those three pieces because Johnny thinks we’re going to put them on the dining room ceiling when we get around to redoing the dining room, and we couldn’t put them in the basement when we realized we didn’t need them because at the time the basement leaked -- and you know how things just become part of the landscape after a while. Now that we fixed the leaking basement by digging out all along the outside of the house and painting it with tar, maybe when Johnny gets back home I’ll have him help me bring these blueboards down there. (Frankly, I like the dining room ceiling the way it is, but we’ll fight over that bridge when we get to it.) In the meantime it looks like my options are to move the blueboard, which is a tremendously hu-monstrous pain in the ass, or to get me an extension cord. Eh, the power in the kitchen is just as new as in the hallway -- one half of it, anyway -- so extension cord it is.

Ooh, look. Crap. Basement’s wet. Guess we didn’t solve this problem with the digging and the painting of the tar. Poops. Well, actually… now that I look again it might have -- hm… Maybe it just leaked in through that rotten window. Maybe the tar-painting did solve the leaching-seepy-wall-leak problem and now we’ve just got a drippy-floody-puddle problem, one that will be easily fixed whenever we can get around to replacing the basement windows. Yeah. Let’s go with that for now.

Okay so I’ve got my stripping music and I’ve got my heat gun but I can’t find the stripping tool that I’ve been using for these eight hundred long years. Well the five-way that Johnny used to try to pull that piece out of the window the other day is lying right there on the coffee table. He’ll be sorry when he gets to Bourne and realizes that he left it, but it’ll do just fine for me for stripping paint for now.

(A five-way, in case you don’t know, is one of these:

It’s called a five-way because it has five uses: the round part is for cleaning rollers, the pointy part is for cleaning brushes, the flat part is for scraping (obviously) and then, um, you can also, um, take apart windows and open beers with it? Okay, it’s not so good at taking apart windows, but you don’t want to bet against me on opening a beer. And when Johnny gets home we’ll ask him what the other two things really are.)

The record player’s all the way in the living room at the other end of the house, so once I turn the heat gun on all I can hear of my stripping music is the bass drum -- ba-da, ba-da, boom, da, boom -- which for some reason makes me keep expecting Don Rickles to come bursting out from behind the door I’m working on (speaking of which, has anybody read his book yet? Is it funny? God, I love that man. Don’t ask me why. I know he’s annoying as all get-out but he makes me laugh. Just call me Jessica Rabbit.)

When the bass drum goes silent, signaling the end of side one, I’m about a quarter of the way through what I’d planned to do today. It’s not going quite as well as I expected (is that a surprise to anyone?). The parts I stripped last year, or whenever it was, came out more or less clean, but today it’s leaving behind a lot of residue. I don’t know if it’s the five-way, or if I’ve forgotten how, or if it’s just the vagaries of the wood (“vagaries” -- there’s a Wordly Wise word for you; you see what happens when you spend too much time sniffing paint fumes? Vocab words from eleventh grade come drifting back…).

This white crap will come off, for the most part, but it takes about three times as long and requires a very, very light touch , which I don’t have the patience for right now (again: surprised?). Plus I don’t know if it’s worth it to even bother, or if the 5F5 will just as easily take it off tomorrow. I know from experience that 5F5 can be a miserable bitch herself sometimes, especially with wood as soft as this is turning out to be -- you don’t want to have to scrub too hard or with too harsh a grade of steel wool. Johnny, of course, isn’t home, so I don’t have my in-house expert to rely on. I’ve got to make this call myself.

Fuck it. I’m leaving it.

(Oh yeah right, what did you think? I was going to do extra work? Come on…)

Side two ends and I consider calling quits. Two sides of a record, that’s enough for one day, right? But then I see the time and remember that those old 33s couldn’t fit as much music on them as these newfangled contrivances the kids listen to today. I’ve only been stripping paint for thirty minutes. Okay, fine. But if I have to keep working I need something else to listen to. Something I can actually hear.

Wistfully I run my finger over the jewel box for the Dolly Parton CD that’s been missing for two years. I’ve kept the empty box in hopes she’ll come back to me someday, but I’m starting to lose hope. I absent-mindedly pick it up, consider finally throwing it away… but wait, this box feels like it’s got something in it. Oh, I am so going to bust Johnny when he gets home! He’s always yelling at me for putting the wrong music in the wrong container, but I haven’t touched this empty box in years. It’s almost cruel that he’d stick something in here. What is it? Planxty? Warren Zevon? Doctor John?

Dolly! You’ve come back! How did you get here? Where have you been? Oh, who cares -- let’s just go finish stripping, shall we?!

Rejuvenated, I resolve to finish this job to-day, or at the very least keep working till the music stops. As it turns out, the second half of the door strips clean like it’s suppose to -- maybe thanks to Dolly’s special charm -- so I’m done before the CD’s even halfway finished. Like a good Puritan I decide to carry on with the bum-pain light-touch work (though I don’t know that you’d hear a good Puritan using the term “bum-pain”). And I do -- right through to the last spun-glass strains of Dolly’s final hallelujah.

I didn’t get all the white crap off, but hopefully the 5F5 will get the rest of it tomorrow.

PS Oh no wait, not tomorrow. Tomorrow’s one of those days I knew about before I started that I’m not going to have time to do this. And maybe Thursday too. Thursday I’ll have time to either do something or write about it, but not both -- and, as Warren Beatty told Madonna: what’s the point in doing anything if it’s not documented somehow? So tomorrow I’ll be off and Thursday I’ll try to write some random thing, and then Friday I will Manifest my inner Puritan again, I swear…

Day Eight: Accomplished
Total Time: About an hour and a half, including clean-up (yes, I cleaned up -- I couldn’t very well let Johnny come home to find I’ve killed our own cats, either, could I?)
Total Cost: Nothing (until the National Grid bill arrives, at least -- heat guns do love them some electricity)
Dolly Parton: Priceless

Day Four, Project Three, : Philips, Flat Or Flowery?

First of all , let me just say: Happy National Homeownership Month, everybody! I’ve been waiting for this ever since I first read about it in the Economist magazine, and now the moment’s finally here. Can’t you just feel the love…?

Okay, back on your heads.

Now that I’ve done it, I realize that taking a door off its hinges is not exactly a thing-a-day job. It took all of thirty seconds. But I was afraid maybe the hinges were so paint-fused together that I’d have to hit them with the 5F5, and if that had been the case I didn’t want to have to do anything else today. And I only have to do what I decide to do ahead of time -- them’s the rules. (Rules which, by the way, I’m making up as I go along and which may change later and I’ll thank you not to point it out to me if they do!).

First of all, I really should have taken the door down before I stripped the frame. But the stripping was taking so freakin’ long that I couldn’t stomach the thought of making the job any bigger. Two years is quite enough, thank you. I figured I’d get to all the un-seeable bits later (and it takes some kind of rationalization to consider the half-stripped coat-closet door, which is literally two feet -- okay maybe three feet -- from your face when you walk in the front door an un-seeable bit. But there you go). And then “later” just never came around. Until now. Damn.

I can’t back up far enough to take a full picture of the door without losing it in a busy portrait of the messiness that is my house. I tried, and what with the wood’s mottled, brown-and-white, half-stripped appearance, well, it came out looking like a pile of laundry in the corner. Or a cow. (And again I say: so long as I do one thing every day, nothing in the rules that I make up says I have to clean -- you should just be glad I don’t have real cows wandering around in here. Although I might. Who would ever know…?). So here’s at least a photo of what the half-stripped doorknob area looks like:



Not a bad looking knob, what? Every door in the house has these exact same ones. They -- whoever, somebody -- tore off the woodwork in the dining room, built an addition over the bulkhead, decorated the bathroom in Pepto-Dismal pink... but the doorknobs, all of them, they left alone. I like them, and the hardware, too. Ooh, in fact, now that I think of it, I really ought to take the hinges off, oughtn’t I?

Okay, I’ll go do that now.

Well, there’s another minute and a half down. Boy, howdy, I am really cooking! It must be this screwdriver Larry bought me…

Larry’s the fella Johnny works with. He bought this screwdriver for me because he was tired of listening to Johnny bitch about his going missing all the time. Honestly, I hated it at first. I’m not generally one for the girly-pink, do-it-herself crap If I’m going to use a tool (and believe you me, I used my share of tools when I was younger), then I want to use a proper tool. So Larry's girly screwdriver stayed in its shrink-wrapped plastic for a really very un-gratefully long time (and please, if you’ve got an explanation as to why in god’s name anyone would need to plastic-wrap a screwdriver, I sure would love to hear it).

But one day I couldn’t find the red one -- a.k.a. “Johnny’s” -- so I finally bit the bullet and unwrapped the flowers. It turns out it’s not so bad. It turns out it’s actually an honest tool. It’s just that it’s all pink and flowery. Which means Johnny won’t touch it. Which means the flowers actually turn out to be a good thing. So now I keep it in my nightstand drawer (so I always know where I can find it) and I use it for everything. Well, not everything -- not “nightstand-drawer” kind of everything, for example. In fact, ew. Now that I’ve had that thought, maybe I should try to find Larry's girly screwdriver another home...

Anyway, aside from it’s intended purpose I have used this flowery thing for stripping paint (it gets the detail of the decorative woodwork better than a stripping tool) for opening beer bottles (but that’s not really fair, I can open beers with anything: spoons, cigarette lighters, magazines, seat belts, table tops, maracas -- wait, seat belts? How did that one get in here? No, no, I would never do something as unsmafe as that... Okay, fine, yes, I did it. I opened a beer bottle with a safety belt. It's not like I was driving. And besides. I really was younger once, you know). And now I’ve used Larry’s -- oh, hell, I might's well just admit it -- my girly screwdriver for prying painted-on hinge pins off of closet doors. I do believe I’ve actually come to love its power-puffiness.

Here’s a picture of it:


Oh, yeah, and that pile in the corner of the shot? Those are the hinges and screws I just took off the door. And that’s probably where they’ll stay until I get around to stripping them: right there on the corner of my desk. So there. I’m the rule-maker-upper of this here manifesto!

Oh all right, fine, I’ll go get a coffee can. But if I can’t find them when I need them, then I’m holding you responsible. You and your stanky keep-the-house-clean rules …

Day Four: Accomplished
Total Time Spent: Seriously, about a minute and a half. Let’s be generous and call it three. Or, as Prince would have it: III.
Total cost: Nothing, nothing, nothing!
Frilly, girly screwdriver that Larry gave me: Priceless