electric mist

insanity?

If you had told me Friday that today I would be standing in the closet of the spare bedroom painting? I would have suggested you get a better grade of crack. Because we were not going to be doing anything of the kind. It was going to be a relaxing weekend. It was going to be all about sleeping late and checking (and rechecking and re-rechecking) the tracking # to see exactly where the computer was on its way here. (Obsessive? Moi?) This weekend was so very not going to be about organizing.

Except, we moved a couple of things out of my office to make it nicer. And we had this spare bedroom going to waste, becoming a junk catch-all, and Carl really needed a place to put bids together that didn't clog up my office, and the man really deserves his own office (after all, he's only been working 22 years). He never really wanted an office before (he's had 'em and ignored them too often to count, so when we moved to this house, we didn't even bother setting him up a place.) But now... he wants one. Mostly because he wants me to be able to write without having the construction clutter driving me to distraction. Some of it always has to be out and accessible; it never feels finished and put to bed. And it always being out makes me feel like I should be doing that instead of taking a couple of hours to write. So, his solution: move all the construction stuff to his office, keep mine just for writing. I can move back and forth as needed for the actual paperwork part; the phone I can still do from my office.

The summer looks to be calm for me, which is what brought all of this on. I could write, and still have the business stuff done. The second business (the national one with the partner) is still a very real possibility, but we're waiting on him to heal from the open-heart surgery before discussing it / setting up the meetings. And if that does go, I won't be doing that paperwork and the construction business will phase down. In the mean time, we have good work, but not the kind which makes my life a living hell (big Federal jobs, I'm looking at you).

So the innocent moving of a couple of things to the back office spot led to us thinking that gee, we could move all of the office supplies back there if that closet was just cleaned out of the old junk / toys / clothes that don't fit. And we don't need the spare bed anymore (Luke needs it at his apartment and each boy still has a bedroom here, so there's usually one empty if we did have an overnight guest). While we were cleaning out the closet and the bed, we thought, gee, while all of this is gone and before we move anything in here, we might as well paint. So off we went to Home Depot and Lowe's and picked out paint (Sienna) and bought trim (white) paint and then the light fixture really wasn't very good, so we got another one, and all of this moving stuff up to the attic meant we needed to get scads of old stored paperwork down and shred it, so we got a new industrial sized paper shredder and since Carl's going to be in the office more, we needed a better phone system in there, so we got a new phone system thingie and then we finished gutting the bedroom and I painted the inside of the closet (two coats!! who knew a tiny closet would take an entire gallon of paint!!) and Carl painted the ceiling and the crown molding... and while we were talking about it, Carl decided that we might as well go ahead and finish trimming out that room to match the molding we've been putting up throughout the house (there was none, we've been adding it to the rooms as we go -- a Craftsman styled framing for the doors and windows, deep baseboards and big crown molding)... and then, while he was at it, he might as well go ahead and put up a raised panel wainscoating because he has always wanted to do that and this is his office after all so he should go ahead while it is empty and...

See? If you had told me I would be painting today, I woudl have known you were on crack because what usually happens is that we start talking about doing something and the damned thing grows so big in our discussion, we know we can't tackle it in a weekend and we talk ourselves out of it. Except, every once in a while, neither of us has a lick of sense and we both nod and say, "Sure!" and go for it and then there is a huge huge huge project which is going to suck up every spare minute for the next week or so until it is done or I kill someone.

If we manage to finish it without maimage or murder happening, it will be very nice. And it will mean that all of the construction stuff is out of my space and into his, which will be wonderful.

But right now? Right now, everything that used to be in that room is all over the place. I had no idea that I had enough stuff in that one room to single-handedly furnish an entire third world country and clothe them all to boot. Damn, it's a lot of junk. So there is a give-away stack (for charity), a very small "keep in the room" stack, and a medium-sized "attic" stack (which still cannot go up there until I get the stuff up there culled through)(yikes).

So when you're finished with that crack, send me some. I'm going to need it.

Posted by toni at June 14, 2004 12:17 AM