There are some universal truths that I have come to accept
about myself. (This is not intended to be an essay of self-deprecation, I
promise.)
I am not graceful, in any far reaching definition or synonym
of the word. Bumping into walls, tripping on cracks, and slamming shins into
fire hydrants that were not in the
middle of the sidewalk are often witnessed occurrences in my day-to-day life. I
know I can successfully move my body in the intended direction I’d aimed for
sometimes. But it is not from any natural grace of movement. It stems more from
an influx of nitty gritty desire. A great showing of heart that can sometimes overcome the ordinarily clumsy path I
take. This is how, once in a while, I can land with my feet in the perfect
squat stance with the barbell above my head in a wonderfully executed snatch.
Or how I have a friend or two who thinks I can actually dance. Which is
hilarious.
I also don’t have a lot of experience in many aspects of
life. I question my drive to be a writer every day because of my lack of
experience. The problem with always being the responsible adult, from the age
of 8, is I had no room for error growing up. The few mistakes I’ve ventured to
make can be counted on one hand. Some of them were doozies, but I believe it is
the little life experiences, not just the big showstoppers, that make for
interesting ingredients in the recipe of writing.
So enters my very first solo project in home improvement.
As a way to keep my head from spinning and dwelling on all
the changes happening in my life, I’ve thrown myself into a larger project,
beginning a few months ago. What was first just an office organization idea,
morphed into something so much more complex, and, well, ambitious. It included gutting
out the closet in the third bedroom in order to create the most glorious
office/craft closet you’ve seen outside of a pinterest photo, and finding the
perfect blend of creative space, guest bungalow, and working nook. All on a
budget of about -$160. No, that negative was not a typo.
I had two bookcases already, beautiful and over priced and
big enough to hold all the special books I just couldn’t let go of. Everyone
should have some semblance of a library, with those certain books you read
often, if rereading books is your thing, books that are practically pieces of
artwork, and books that have a sentimental hold on your heart. Doesn’t matter
if you only have two books that fit this category, or five boxes of books like
me. It’s your library and should be displayed with honor.
So since the books were taken care of, I just needed to find
that small organizational bone my body had been hiding to take care of craft
supplies, storage of photos and pieces of Gabriel’s schoolwork, the minimal
amount of office supplies I own, and the board games gathering dust in a
corner. Here is where pinterest has ruined my life.
Ok, you all know what this is like, right? I’ve got an
“Organization” board. I’ve got a “For the home” board. I’ve got a “DIY
projects” board. And I have done squat with them. Nothing. I take that back. I
spray painted a few thrift store picture frames about a year and a half ago,
from a pin on my “DIY projects” board. Riveting, ground breaking stuff. So of
course, pinterest is where I went for my Office Organization project.
The problem with pinterest is its filled with wonderful
pictures. Pictures of strategically placed and perfectly color coordinated
furniture and accents that look so incredibly homey and gorgeous at the same
time, with a title “I got or made everything in this room for under $193!”
Pictures of a cute girl in a maxi dress, with the title “Make a maxi dress out
of one piece of fabric and a tongue depressor!” Pictures of petite, adorable
appetizers that look like you’d want to lick the plate after devouring them, with
the title “Crockpot appetizers! Three ingredients, and they practically make
themselves!”
Everything in the pictures and short descriptions make these
things look so achievable! And I’m not the first to recognize the hilarity that
ensues when trying to replicate what the most popular pins indicate is a breeze
to accomplish. There’s also pins that call out “Nailed it!” showing pictures
from pinterest, and pictures of what the actual outcome was when real people
tried to do these things. But even though I intellectually knew that things
might not turn out as planned, I still attempted to recreate some simple things
I pinned.
I should have known better.
So remember when I said I’m not graceful, nor do I have a
lot of life experience? (Lack of common sense is sort of a side effect of no
life experience, by the way.) Try wrecking out a closet, patching drywall,
ripping out carpet, painting, and putting up shelves with these particular
character deficiencies. I mean, when you can’t hold power tools without tripping
on a cord, or you measure holes for brackets using a level and still manage to have the shelves go in crooked, you’re
basically doomed, right? But that’s exactly what I did.
Surprisingly, I only cut myself once. By dropping a
screwdriver on my bare foot. I was wearing flip-flops, which apparently aren’t
the approved footwear for wrecking out closets. Or any other type of home
improvement project. I was using the screwdriver, along with one of those pry
bar things, to pry a 1”x6”x8’ slat of wood from the wall, which led to the
inevitable holes in the drywall that needed to be patched. Good thing my first
attempt at patching drywall was in the back corner of a closet. I definitely
don’t have any kind of artistic flair with a metal spatula and Spackle.
Should’ve flirted with a general contractor at some point in
my life, is all I’m saying.
So now I’ve got walls with ridges, paint layers where the
existing shelves met the walls, Spackled nail holes, that sort of thing. So of
course I need to sand, right? I drove myself to Ace Hardware.
Lack of life experience includes never going to hardware
stores by myself. I’ve always had David to handle that sort of thing. From
hanging a picture, to taking out a wall in our new house, I always depended on
David to take care of the physical work involved in house improvement. He is so
handy; I never needed to even make
sure I could orient myself in a Lowe’s because I was always following his lead.
It’s funny. To the outside observer, it appears that I navigated our marriage.
I have always been the caretaker, the main provider, the one with the
responsibility of the world on my shoulders. But to be able to tell a Phillips
screwdriver from a flathead screwdriver, to be able to buy paint, or get a new
doorknob, or understand what the different grits of sandpaper are used for,
these were like unexplored paths of the maze of home ownership that I had never
needed to traverse. And frankly, I never wanted to. It worked well, this
division of abilities. I could create a spreadsheet that practically danced on
your computer screen, and he could handle an air compressor and all its attachments with finesse and
agility.
I knew I was already in over my head on this project, so as
soon as I stepped foot in Ace’s, I pounced on the first red-vested person I
could find. I explained what I had planned for the closet, stared at the floor
tiles while sharing the tale of the Great Closet Wreckage of 2014 and the
drywall repair debacle, and ended with an exclamation that I must have an electric
sander to continue with my project. Now, this guy could have been my
grandfather. And I could tell that if I were his granddaughter, he’d be
removing all electric power tools from my possession, rather than helping me
acquire another one. But I stood my ground and did not let him talk me out of
my desire for the sanding power of the gods. So we compromised, and I left with
a compact sander, three different grits of sandpaper, and the provision of my
promise that I would start with the least harsh grit on the wall surface.
Now, I’m sure some of you have sanded before. So you’re
probably shaking your heads already at what could happen when I have a power
sander in my hands. Fortunately, either it was not powerful enough, or the grit
of the sandpaper was not harsh enough, so I avoided sanding a hole right
through the wall, which is the image I’d squashed immediately before beginning.
Nope, I sanded like a pro. Well, at least like someone who doesn’t have a
professional sander in her hands and wasn’t being too picky about having some
rough areas left in the recesses of the sides of the closet. I sanded, wiped,
sanded some more, gave my hands some breaks, opened windows, and sanded till I
was satisfied painting would take care of the rest. I’m not sure how long it
took, but I was content.
Then I looked around the room.
Everything was coated with a fine, white dust, similar to
baking flour. The bookcases, the books, the boxes, the stacks of games and
piles of stuff waiting to be organized. Everything! I looked down and I was
covered head to toe in the white substance. I started to laugh. I guess there
are sanders that come with bags. But Grandpa Ace hadn’t felt I was responsible
enough to own that MacDaddy of all sanders, the one with the bag attached. I’m still in the working
stages of this project, so I didn’t kill myself trying to clean the dust off of
everything. But it seriously looked like an old mausoleum that’s been closed
for centuries, covered in the dirt of generations. Especially when even the guest
bed was covered with it.
I finally got to paint the closet. I’ve had this vision in
my head of painting the closet with this vibrant orange. I love bold hues and
pops of color in unexpected places. Sherwin Williams had my orange of choice, “Robust
Orange,” and I was fully prepared to take that huge leap. But after sanding,
and taking shelves out and finding different colors of paint under the slats of
wood, I knew I’d have to put down some primer. I may not know much, but I knew
to do that. Gabriel wanted to help, of course, and since most of the walls were
white, we just painted the patches and the places that weren’t white. Because
that should be all that we’d need to paint, right? Haha.
I’d grabbed a can of white primer out of the garage, not knowing
that there is a difference between water based and oil based paint. It wasn’t
until after Gabriel was covered to the elbows in white paint, vainly trying to
wash it off in the utility sink with soap and water that I suspected we were
dealing with a new breed of animal. One that I’d never before encountered. The
more he scrubbed, the more the paint seemed to spread up his arm, turning it
from nude colored to opaque white. I thought, he must not be using enough soap, or scrubbing hard enough. Silly
me. I dove in and tried to scrub it off of him. Ended up with my own lily-white
hands.
Where’s David been during this entire endeavor, you might
ask? Well, we’ve been living together during this transition. But from the
start of this project, I could tell he didn’t want anything to do with it, and
maybe even had a small desire to show me what I’d be dealing with once I was
living on my own. But when I scrubbed and scrubbed and watched with horror as
the white crept up my arms like it had Gabriel’s, I finally called in my Get
Out of Jail Free card, and made David help us. He only had brush cleaner in the
garage, which I later learned does not work as well on oil-based paints as
mineral oil does. He proceeded to pour it over both of us, as we washed and
screeched and scrubbed and growled about the stinging and minimal help the
brush cleaner was providing. Gabriel and I both managed to get most of the
paint off our arms, and the palms of our hands. We gave up on the rest, and
neither of us returned to our normal skin color for a few days after.
And of course, after all that, it still took three coats of
orange paint to cover the different white patches on the original walls and the
spots with primer on them! At least the “Robust Orange” was water-based. That’s
all I needed, orange and white hands and arms, like I was turning into Tony the
Tiger.
I’ve alluded to the fact that somehow I managed to put up
the shelves crooked, even with the use of a gigantic level. (Seriously, why
does the level need to be so long? I smacked the walls, my head, and the dog
with it on more than one occasion.) And many can infer the level of my
frustration and the limits I had finally reached since I did not take it all
down, patch up the holes and start over, but rather left them crooked. One side
is exactly 1/4” higher than the other side. I’m just saying, for a control
freak like me, that one was hard to let go. But I did put them up successfully,
for the most part. Until I started trying to place things on the shelves to see
what would look nicely proportional and reminiscent of the pinterest photos. I
placed one box on a shelf, and it was apparently too heavy and/or I plunked it
down too enthusiastically, because one bracket started to pull out of the wall.
Yes, I used anchors. No, I did not use a stud finder. To me, a stud finder is a
well-placed beach chair on Lanakai Beach in Oahu, preferably with a cup holder
that has a mai tai in it. If you want me to find the studs in the walls, you’ve
come to the wrong woman.
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| "Robust Orange" and crooked shelves. Yes, they are crooked, trust me! |
So I’d had enough of the closet, and rather than pitch the
one renegade shelf through a window, I decided to take a break from that piece
of the project. The other somewhat crafty endeavor I wanted to take on was
finding a nightstand and possibly a desk for the room. Preferably used and at
the right price point. I’d begun to comb through thrift stores for possible
pieces, but hadn’t found anything worthwhile. I had my heart set on a black
rolling wooden chair straight out of an old detective noir film that I’d seen
at a furniture consignment store, but was really striking out on the desk and
nightstand fronts.
I finally found a cute round table with delicate, curved
legs for $15 at EcoThrift that would work nicely as a nightstand, and bought
some paint from my new favorite paint store, Sherwin Williams. This time, since
I was buying oil-based paint due to the durability it would provide for the
table, I also bought the mineral oil and some gloves. Look at me, learning from
my mistakes as I go!
I set up a drape sheet at the edge of the garage, so I could
sand and paint in the nice weather. I sanded on the driveway to minimize the
mess of the dust (see, learning!) After cleaning off the table, I painted it as
it stood. Then the next day I flipped it and painted the undersides and feet once
the first paint job dried. On the second day, I
bent down to get as into the nooks and crannies on the underside. My head grazed the table feet, freshly painted, of
course, and without even thinking about it, I reached up to brush the hair out
of my face. Then the wind started to blow, and wonderful pieces of tree
droppings began blowing my way, sticking to the surface of the freshly painted
table. So I scrambled to get the particles off the surface before it dried that
way, and forgot about my hair.
That evening I was in the kitchen cooking when David showed
up from a day of fishing. He took one look at me, snorted, and shook his head
as he walked away. When I called after him to ask what was so comical, he told
me to go look in the mirror. When I did, I found that I had a large purple
streak across my forehead, and purple streaks in the front section of my hair.
Because of course I was painting the table a beautiful “Wood Violet” as an
accent color. Ok, sure, it wasn’t the first time I’d dyed my hair purple, but
the streak across the forehead was a new look for me. Of course, being
oil-based paint, it wasn’t going to come off easily, and took quite a long time
with my face exfoliator to diminish the violet hue of my skin.
 |
| $15 thrift store nightstand. My first thrift store furniture purchase! |
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| "Wood Violet" is totally my color. |
My project is still not finished. At the rate I’m going, I’ll be redoing a number of things I’ve already done, or causing myself additional work because of my naiveté when it comes to home improvement skills.
When I put the work in at the gym, I do things like
repeatedly doing snatch work to improve my form, dropping into a squat to get
my foot placement right, practicing the pulls and starting position. I do it
over and over again, and because of my lack of grace and coordination, (and sometimes my inconsistent visits), I can never seem to do it
correctly more than a couple of times in a row. You need more than grace though,
in order to succeed at a lift. You need tenacity, heart, willfulness, and all
the other traits that seem to come naturally to crossfitters.
As I take on new challenges every day, moving into the light
of a new chapter of my life, I will need that stubborn will to succeed, despite
my natural tendencies to bump into walls, trip over cracks, and learn lessons
the hard way. I am opening myself to new experiences, ones that aren’t of epic
proportions, but are fodder for a writer who is clumsy, eccentric, and goes
through life streaked in violet in one way or another.
My next home improvement project will involve turning
plumbing pipes and wood into shelves for Gabriel’s room. I saw it on pinterest,
and it looks totally doable.
