There is an old saying, “If you want something done, you have to do it yourself,” that I think should be revised to: “If your wife wants something done, you have to do it yourself.” This brings to mind another old saying that can’t be printed in a family newspaper. It explains why I spent my vacation last week painting the living room.
This project had been in the works since the day after I last painted the living room. That was the week we moved into our house five years ago.
The room was originally a hideous shade of brownish-orange.
To make matters worse, the living room, which is the size of an airplane hangar, had ugly wooden ceiling beams and wall moldings that my wife hated the moment she saw them. The next moment, after I had finished painting, she said she wanted me to take them all down.
Slow-forward to last month. Unable to hold out any longer, I agreed to take them all down. The moldings came off the bottoms of the walls and the wall corners easily. But the two big ceiling beams wouldn’t budge. At first I used a crowbar, but because I was punching holes in the ceiling I could have put my fist through, which I was about to do anyway, I switched to screwdrivers. They were delicious, the perfect combination of vodka and orange juice, and were responsible for my shockingly stupid idea to use a rope to pull down the beams.
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Fortunately, I am pathetically weak, so it didn’t work. A good thing, too, because if I had loosened one of those heavy beams, it would have come crashing down on my head and split apart (the beam, not my head, which is rock-solid). Then I could have used it to build a fire, which would have been an even worse idea because we don’t have a fireplace and the house would have burned down. At least I wouldn’t have had to paint the living room.
My wife called a handyman whose name she got out of the phone book. He said he would come over and, for a price that could have paid for a year of college, do the job. He must have immediately gone into the Federal Witness Protection Program because he never showed up. So I tried again to get the beams down and this time succeeded without, for better or for worse, killing myself.
The ceiling looked like I had fired a shotgun into it, so my wife called another handyman who came over to patch the ceiling but didn’t finish sanding it and said he would be back. He did stick around long enough for my wife to offer him the painting job. He accepted, at a price that could have bankrupted our mortgage company, and never showed up again.
This is why American business is in such bad shape: If you don’t want people to do a job, they won’t leave you alone until you hire them, but if you do, they won’t do the job.
So you have to do it yourself.
I began my vacation by plugging holes and sanding the ceiling, which I decided to paint first because I am afraid of being any higher off the ground than the top of my head and wanted to get that part of the project out of the way. But because the ceiling had a rough finish and the sanded patches were smooth, I had to buy sand to put into the ceiling paint so the whole thing wouldn’t come out looking like some idiot (such as me) had painted it.
If I had any sense, I would have gone to the beach for the sand and stayed there.
The ceiling came out OK, a bit uneven, perhaps, because I used an ice scraper to roughen up the smooth patches, but my wife is 5-foot-1, so she’ll never notice.
I spent most of the rest of the week painting the walls a lovely shade of white dogwood or whatever color my wife picked out. By the time I had finished, I was off the wall.
My wife says the room finally looks nice and she’s happy I saved her all that money. I’m happy, too, because I’m back to work. After my week off, I could use a vacation.