Dust, Dust Everywhere

The theme of this weekend is painting. I'm on day three of a self-imposed, four-day sanity weekend. I'm turning two walls in my kitchen/living room from olive to burgundy. The house came with olive walls, which I didn't mind, until the holiday family get together when everybody - every person I'm immediately related to, save mom & dad and a niece's husband who weren't present but including two who aren't officially family yet - everybody hated it. I decided to change up the colors. Oh, one-year old DJ didn't weigh in with an opinion.

The first project was to replace the cheap vinyl in the entry with burgandy Linoleum (tm). That two-day job took about four weeks. Next comes changing to walls to burgandy, then the powder room and a kitchen half-height wall get a contrasting sand color.

Before with get into the gritty details, I'm currently waiting for a garage door repair service. The torsion spring, the coil over the door, broke on Friday. The guy said it's about a $140 job. Not much but always more than a guy wants to spend. At the moment, the garage door is a large paperweight, as it's too heavy for me to lift. That spring seems to be rather important in the anti-gravity scheme of things.

So, back to painting. I'm a big believer in prep work. I've learned a couple of things about prep this week-end. First, taking off trim and patching dings is a lot of work. Next, nobody is going to care about the little dings. In fact, I'm sure I'll start adding new dings shortly after the final coat dries, if not before. Next, I'm very bad at repairing dings. I may be making things worse. Finally, sanding spackle and old paint creates a large amount of dust. Very fine dust that gets everywhere. My shop vac seems to be sucking up the dust, filtering out the largest particles and spewing the finest of the fine particles out into every corner of both the kitchen and living room. My house is hardly spic & span on the best of days, but I cannot envision a time when I will not have a fine layer of dust everywhere.

The primer goes on this afternoon. The first coat of burgandy tomorrow.