So, remember my last column when I was talking about my husband and me painting our front porch?
What? You didn’t read that one?
Sigh…okay. Go on to your computer right now, go to the East County Times website, and read it.
We’ll wait.
Tick, tick, tick, tick…
Back yet? Finally! I mean, okay, let’s get back to the column now. (And thanks to all of you faithful readers who didn’t have to go back and read it online. You get extra Awesome Reader points.)
First, let me say that my husband and I are not exactly MacGyver when it comes to home improvement projects. I’d say we’re more like Tim Taylor, Tim Allen’s character on the ‘90s sitcom “Home Improvement.”
Except that I think he may have actually gotten some of his projects eventually done right.
Well, we decided to redo our front porch. The posts were rotting, the paint was chipped, and the front door was faded.
I started by doing my impression of Ralph Macchio in “The Karate Kid.”
Actually, I just kept saying “Karate here,” which was Mr. Miyagi’s line, as I kicked all the rotted spindles out.
So really, I was nothing like the Karate Kid. Except that I was about to paint.
Oh, and complain about it. That, I would also do.
After the rotted posts were gone, we needed to get the paint off the floor of the porch. Paint specialists gave us chemicals to get it to come off.
And these chemicals required us to suit up in long sleeves, long pants, and face masks.
Did I mention when we decided to do this?
Um, last July.
Considering that I was literally going to faint being bundled up like that, my husband and our friend got to work.
They used the solution.
Some of the paint came off.
A lot of it didn’t.
So they scraped and scraped and scraped and scraped…
And scraped and scraped and scraped and scraped…
Then scraped and scraped and scraped and scraped…
But much of the paint adhered to the floor like a woman gripping the last Cabbage Patch Kid doll at Christmastime in the ‘80s (yes, I’ve just totally dated myself. Like, totally.).
So they stopped. A friend who does home improvement told them, “If it won’t come up, then you just leave it down.”
Would have been good to know after the first few scrapings.
Our prep and painting experiences have never been stellar. There was the time in our first house when my husband and I stripped the wallpaper in the spare bedroom serving as my office. In that instance, we too, scraped and scraped and scraped…
Well, you get the idea.
Most of it went off without a hitch. Until the last night of painting.
Seeing how exhausted I was, my husband told me to go to bed, and he would finish the last bits of painting.
I awoke an hour later to lots of cursing. When I went into the office, I saw my husband standing with one foot in the air, mauve paint dripping from his saturated sneaker.
“What happened?” I asked him.
He had finished painting a spot on the ceiling, and he stepped down off the chair without looking…
And proceeded to stick his entire foot directly into the paint can, which was still about half full.
As you can imagine, dear readers, we were finished painting that night. In fact, we didn’t paint for a long time after that.
But just as women forget the pain of childbirth so that more babies can enter the world, we always tend to forget the stupid things we’ve done while painting so that more of the world around us becomes beautified.
Until, as my husband has pointed out, I decided to write them all down in two columns.
Now, we’ll have the memories to treasure forever.
Michele Wojciechowski, when she’s not remembering even more painting mishaps (but refuses to write a third column about painting, as that would make her and her husband look completely incompetent), writes “Wojo’s World®” from Baltimore.