Painting

In yet another of my technological blunders, the pictures I took with the intention of posting them here are firmly embedded in my digital camera's internal memory, and I can't retrieve them until I get home. So this will be the unillustrated version.

My mom and my sister have been painting my mom's house the past couple weeks, and they've been doing just fine, but they saved the master bedroom with its vaulted ceilings until I got here. My sister is five feet tall, and my mom is five-foot-two. At five-six, that makes me the towering Amazon of the family with a reach like the long arm of the law.

The previous owner liked to stencil. She liked it a lot. The guest bathroom had cowboy motifs stenciled along the top of the wall and around the bath/shower combo. My mom defeated that room first. The kitchen had sunflowers around the top and down the two sides. The dining room had a picket fence around the bottom and ivy around the top. But the master bedroom had latticework, with grapevines, stenciled up both sides of each corner in the room and along the top of the walls and on the ceiling--not just around the edges, but two strips of lattice and grapevine up the middle of the angled part of the ceiling. And my mom isn't the lattice-grapevine-sunflower-fence-ivy-cowboy-stencil kind of mom. Her bedroom was driving her nuts. Good thing I got here when I did.

It took two coats of Kilz to cover up the stencil, and even then, the grapevines showed through a little. I wasn't sure the light green paint would cover it, but it did. My job was to do the blue tape, because I could reach, to wrap a sheet around the ceiling fan when it was time to paint the ceiling, and to do all the high painting. I spent two days climbing up and down the six-foot ladder and moving it in circles around the room. My sister did most of the ceiling with an extension for the roller, while I did the painting around the fan (it's hard to see where to paint when there's a sheet hanging in your face), around the heater vent, and around the edges. My mom tried the other extension roller, but it made her dizzy looking up that way, so she had to stop. For the walls, my mom and my sister got as high as they could, and I took the high parts. It worked out just fine.

We did the Kilz and the darker green wall the first day, and we did the ceiling and the three light green walls the second day and got the room put back together, so my mom could sleep in it the second night. Both mornings since, my mom has said how much she loves the new room now that the grapevines are gone for good.

There's only one more room left to paint, but it has standard ceilings (and no stencils), so they'll be able to handle it without me. I start on my two-day (possibly three-day) drive home tomorrow morning.

It's been wonderful being with family again, not thinking about work or chores around my own house. Or what's going on in the news. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss. But it isn't bliss forever, and I'm looking forward to getting back into the fray.

Not yet, though. Tonight is the fish fry being put on by my mom's church. No, my mom and my sister (gasp!) don't attend the same church. But before that, we have to drop off the brownies and cookies the two of them baked for my sister's church bake sale. And we'll watch a movie when my niece gets home from her third-to-last day of school as a junior. Yep, it's a full day of activity here in central Texas (population around 3,800), where the nearest Wal-Mart is in the next town over and the nearest Target is about an hour away, so we don't go there (bummer).

Vacation is a beautiful thing. I heartily recommend it.