I am not skilled in home improvements. For forty-one years, I've been married to the best handyman, skilled mechanic, do-it-yourselfer anyone could ever ask for. It's due to Bill's skills that I've never honed any of my own. And maybe it took the luxury of retirement and all that spare time to try my hand. But two months ago, when I took up a paintbrush and started painting the master bedroom of the new house in AZ, it got to be fun. And it was getting intriguing when I began painting the walls of the Great Room in three color stripes. So it was starting to become 'natural' when I returned to the beach this summer and decided to do something about the thirty-seven year old wood paneled walls in the mobile home. In the Seventies, we were "downtown brown", I'm sure. I felt we were fairly fashionable in 1972 when we moved in. And being a busy mother and working woman, I never found the time to try turning the walls anything other than the brown paneling with Seventies harvest yellow fixtures in them. But now... ah yes, now that I've found this new unused until now skill of painting and re-decorating, well, now the urge is upon me to turn my brown walls into anything but brown walls.
And because I'm a Gemini and we seek Instant Gratification, I decided to start on the smallest bathroom in the house, so that I wouldn't have to wait weeks for the room to be done. The first step after removing all the hardware was to primer the walls and the ceiling a nice matte white. But after the first thick coating of Kilz was spread upon all the surfaces, you could still see layers of brown paneling peeking through the paint. So Willy took a look at it and advised it needed a second coat of primer. I sighed. Apparently, this small bathroom was growing larger each day. It wasn't going to be done in a few days, or even a week. It took me ten days to get all the coats of primer put down on it.
In the meantime, I'd visited Home Depot and settled upon a pretty pale lime green for the walls. It was called "Spirit Whisper" and I think I picked it as much for its color as its name. Someday, when I get really famous, it would be fun to write names for paint. I found a very pale cousin of it in the same hue, only infinitesimally faint called "Green Shimmer" for the ceiling. So one evening while I was waiting for the inspiration to get the second coat of primer on the still dark walls, I gilded the ceiling with the "Green Shimmer". It moved me to continue onwards. My bathroom that I'd been accustomed to for the past thirty seven years appeared to belong to somebody else. It was growing bigger under its nice light coloring.
Over the course of the next ten days, the walls bloomed with the bright "Spirit Whisper" of green coloring. I'd found a pretty cantaloupe-y color called "Delicious Melon" that turned to be much paler than whatever was promised on the paint chip for the trim and the cupboards. Apparently, my cantaloupe was less ripe than the one on the paint chip, but I stuck with it and turned the mirror and door trims and the cupboard doors a pale melon color. The molding trim in the corners and on the floor were harder to paint. I had to locate one of the little boys' paintbrushes and paint tiny strokes on the molding so I didn't ruin the "Spirit Whisper" of the walls. Man... interior decorating was time consuming. I found my nightly sewing not happening and my shirt inventory dwindling while I labored each evening with my new found hobby. I was bordering on the obsessive - I had to finish my bathroom.
Finally, after three weeks, the walls were finished. The cupboards were painted and the doors rehung. (Yes, I'd learned to screw too.) The fixtures were either replaced or rehung. The bathroom was complete. That is-- er -- not exactly. The thirty-seven year old linoleum still glared back from the floor, a blatant harvest yellow pattern in a very Seventies pattern. It didn't exactly "flow" with the room. Pam advised me to check out some very inexpensive peel 'n'stick tiles at Lowe's. For a dollar a square foot (hey, I only had to buy twenty square feet for this tiny room), I got some vinyl tile that looked just like the Italian porcelain tile we'd laid in the AZ kitchen two years ago. It was a pretty cream marble color with a trace of pinkish-melon running through it.
I bought it and brought it home, determined on Tuesday to finish the project. Upon closer inspection, the first thing that needed to be done was to remove all the floor molding. Oh dear! All that time consuming work with the tiny paintbrush on my hands and knees kneeling behind the toilet, painting that melon color... done for! The molding when I finally got it up was in three or more pieces, so into the trash it went. Then I spent an hour giving the old floor a good onceover with sandpaper. Then (I am not proud of this part!) I spent, I kid you not!, the next two and a half hours on my hands and knees sticking tiles, measuring them, cutting them none too expertly with scissors and sticking them down in that tiny bathroom. Cutting around the toilet was not fun and far from perfect. It's a good thing I am NOT a perfectionist or I'd probably want it ripped up and re-done. But I know who would have to rip it up and Re-Do it and I'm not wanting to do that, thank you, so the less than perfect job will have to stand for now.
All that remains is to procure some new molding, measure it, cut it, paint it and nail it down. I'm not good at cutting, but then I wasn't good at measuring or painting or screwing either, was I? And it's getting done. So the next question is, what room shall I start on next?
