#MicroblogMondays: There will be DUST :p

I used to think infertility & stillbirth were the toughest things my husband & I could go through -- that if we could survive THAT, we could survive anything.

And then -- we decided to paint the house.

Just kidding!! (Well, sort of...)  We're not even the ones doing the work. We attempted to paint the house (inside) ourselves 11 years ago this month, and let's just say we learned our lesson. We thought it would take us about a week (yeah, right), and took precious vacation time to do it. We managed to get the first floor done (including scraping multiple walls full of wallpaper left by the previous owners) before dragging our exhausted butts back to the office (vacation? what vacation??), and then spent the next 11 years cringing over our all-too-visible errors. (We completed the bedrooms over the next several weekends, and hired a pro to finish off the floor-to-ceiling stairwell. We DID get better as we went along.)

This time around, we hired stepBIL (a handyman who renovated our bathroom seven years ago) to paint inside and out, refinish our kitchen cupboard doors and put up a backsplash, along with a couple of other details. He estimated it would take him a week, maybe two. 

What was that about the best-laid plans, etc...?  We're now into week THREE, and there's still a couple of days' work left to do. Granted, we're getting there. Both the top and bottom floors have been painted, and the basement (which hasn't been touched since FIL finished it for us in 1999) is partly finished. (Finishing it is going to involve unshelving the contents of four IKEA bookcases into piles on the floor, and then reloading them after the paint is dry and the shelves put back into place.)  We have a spiffy new ceramic tile backsplash in the kitchen and the cupboard doors are in the midst of being sanded, restained and updated with new handles. The outside shutters, panel above the garage door have been painted, and the front door will be painted to match shortly. (Unfortunately, some of the shutters need to be redone, after they were hammered by the remnants of hurricane Patricia, which left the fresh paint job peeling & bubbling.) The outdoor lighting fixtures have been replaced, and new smoke detectors installed. 

While stepBIL has obviously been doing most of the work, dh and I have not been entirely idle (hence, my absence from the blogosphere the past two weeks).  We've made multiple trips to Home Depot, stripped the last of the wallpaper (a hangover from the previous owners, 25+ years ago), moved stuff from one room to another (and up & down stairs)(and will be unloading & reloading said bookshelves today or tomorrow), taken advantage of the opportunity to go through and set aside stuff to be donated, and wiped down dust-coated furniture and cupboards -- over & over & over again. (OMG, the DUST!!!)(And, most important, made daily afternoon coffee/tea runs to the nearest Tim Hortons, lol.)

We get along pretty well with stepBIL -- but let's face it, three adults tripping over each other in a smallish (1,400 square foot) house, with regular routines completely disrupted, stuff out of place and scattered all over the house (including two nights spent sleeping -- or TRYING to sleep...! -- on an uncomfortable 30-year-old sofa bed while the paint dried in our bedroom) -- 8 hours a day, six days a week for two weeks straight (and counting) -- can get to be just a LITTLE stressful.

Let's just say I'm glad we didn't decide to go for a full-scale renovation. Eeekkkk!!

(An earlier version of this post was prematurely published (& then reverted to draft mode) on Sunday... apologies for any inconvenience to anyone who saw it.)

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.