Home Improvement(s)

I'm taking today off. You'll be able to find me on my living room couch enjoying the Harry Potter marathon that's going on and reading. That's partially because I went to sleep at midnight last night and woke up at 4:30 to get S to the airport. It's also partially because it's Sunday and I've always liked to keep Sundays for myself. It's mostly so that I can prepare myself for the bigger projects around the house that await me.

Up until now, I've spent my time at home doing a thorough spring cleaning and while it took a long time and the house is much better looking because of it it really wasn't that taxing. I didn't have to spend money on supplies and I couldn't really mess up. Well, the spring cleaning is done and that means that the bigger projects remain. Starting tomorrow I become a regular at the local Ace Hardware and Home Depot. Instead of a rag, dust polish and a vacuum cleaner my tools will become paint brushes, drop clothes, an electric sander, spackle and a putty knife.

I think I'm prepared. My father spend an extraordinary amount of energy while making sure that I was useful. I spent all my summer throughout high school and college around the house doing things like sanding and staining/repainting stairs and storage sheds, mowing and triming the lawn, washing and waxing the cars and even pouring cement steps.

I'm a little nervous now though. This time the supplies are on me - if I waste or buy the wrong things then it's our money down the drain. I won't be able to just yell around the corner to Dad to see if I'm doing something correctly (although the cell phone will be handy). Of course the motivation to do my projects and do them well the first time is huge. There's the aforementioned problem of the supplies no longer coming from the magical parental bank account. There's also (and more importantly) the fact that I'm working on our own house. Everything I do to make it look nicer will make our time in it more pleasant and will help somewhere down the line when we try to sell this place.

And so the two major projects for this particular week are:

1) To fix the paint trim around the ceilings (and in some cases the ceiling paint itself) where we got a little tired last summer when we first moved in. In our defense we did all of our painting in about 3 days and it was hot and we had just moved and well, we just got tired and after a while that blue tape (that didn't really work all that well to begin with) just seemed like superfluous effort. I've gotten pretty used to the ragged trim in our rooms and even those occasional splotches of brown or blue that we managed to get on the ceiling.....but......it's not the prettiest........and now I have the time to go around and fix it.

2) To strip (with my brand new electric sander - yay!) and then paint the deck railing. I'm not sure if it's because the paint that's on there now was cheap, wasn't waterproofed, or this amount of peeling and fading is typical after suffering through a winter but it's not at all a pretty site out there. So I'll be taking my little chip of paint to Home Depot and requesting a gallon of the same stuff. Someone remind me to pay attention to the weather forecast before I decide to tackle that one.......

I'll let you know how it goes.