A Home Improvement Post For Your Entertainment

    So after a week of getting insurance quotes, I  made no insurance decisions and instead decided it was time to fix the bathroom.
     Lemme 'splain "fix". We've lived here 12 years and the bathroom has not been touched other than to rip out a strip of wallpaper and put up dinosaur stencils. (seen below. With a hunter green background, the dinos were pink-ish). This is how I "design".

    I had grand plans for this tiny little bathroom, but as the girls grew up and Genoa became a whirling dirvish, I gave up. There is makeup smeared everywhere. The wallpaper is half heartedly peeled off in places, the tile is cracked, there is a hole in the door where G or H kicked it when they were fighting. And the piece de resistance: Harper poured KILLS down the sink drain. I told her to empty the last of the paint, it was my fault, clearly.
     Since I pledged to  Do A Thing this summer, I decided on the bathroom.
     It's not a full rip out, we can't afford to do that quite yet. I just wanted to get it to a point where guests could use it and not exit filthier than when they entered.
      Step One was to convince Genoa I was going to paint over the dinos. Harper was ready for it, she couldn't wait. But G gets weirdly attached to things. So I promised to take a picture and then frame the picture and put it in the bathroom.
      Step Two was to peel the hideous wallpaper.
 

         Once it came down, I  had to texture. That's fun in an unventilated space. Yes. Then I was ready to paint. But I had decided on light green with black door frames and maybe paint the cabinets black. Harper did not agree. So we looked at small bathrooms on pinrest and she found polka dots. Black and white polkda dots. Which work in the sink part of the bathroom, but the tile by the bathtub has pink and green in it. So we'll polka dot that room with green.
        But now it's black and white.

 It's better than it was. Did those edges, eh?

But now I have to get new switchplates, a vent, figure out what to do with the mirrors and paint polka dots.

Which means design.  (ERIC PUNG STOP LAUGHING)

Which means someone else has to finish this.

 I "design" like I "cook". It's basic, it is functional and it won't kill you.

But nobody is going to enjoy the experience.

 

I saw this great thing on pinrest -a How To tile around your mirrors. It's really awesome, but...I can't do it. It won't matter how basic it is, I will make it look ghetto. I promise. It is my gift, it is my curse.

 

But I also can't stop here, it's clean and functional but so bland.

My girls inherited by design incapabilities, so no help there.

I was thinking I'll bag the polka dots and tile and just hang pictures and plants and put scarves around the mirrors...(STOP LAUGHING KAYLEN HIGGINS)

 

Sigh.

No talent for design is like a birth defect. It's really frustrating. I once painted the hallway Bronco orange, unaware that it was Bronco orange.

 

As I was painting and thinking about the mirrors (whyOHWHY did they love unframed mirrors in the seventies?) I was like "I could do ribbon or fabric, fabric one tile the other...just frame them out.."and every time I would have to stop myself by screaming "STOP TRYING TO DESIGN! Just paint the damned walls."

So I did.

 

Anyway. I did a thing!

And while I did I wrote the greatest blogs in my head!

I have many things to say about the president, Florida, racism,profiling, aging labradors, abortion,insurace companies, college tuition, and the heat.

And all of these things were passionate in my head as I stripped and painted in a tiny, unventilated bathroom for four days.

Then I went outside and none of it mattered. There was air outside.

 

I did a thing!

Of Purges and Pondering

        I'll keep the exposition short so we can get right to the babbling.

        Four years of Jim being largely unemployed or underemployed + kryssi being a public school teacher (meaning no raise, ever again as long as I live) = the Martin house is sagging.

       Which is better than having lost it altogether. Let us keep perspective. We still have  our house and our two cars.
        The last four to five years have sucked for just about everyone.
    
        The financial shitstorm also means no vacation. No money to try and keep the house up.
  
        And No Will To Do Anything.

         I pulled up just short of hanging out on my porch wearing a wife beater and nursing a can of Coors Light. Manic Depressives do not exactly excel under the above circumstances.
  
         So this year Jim got a job. A real job, a place to go and be productive at a place he likes and they pay him, on time. Underpaid a bit but we are trying not to complain. And even though a real vacation is still not possible, we did at least get to schlep around Durango for a few days.
         So I started purging the house. As a bit of a karma, feng shui geek, I am aware that all of the crap of the last four years is lurking in bedroom corners, stuck in 30 year old wallpaper and poised to strike when I open any closet.
         I decided that enough was enough, and spent June winding down, doing a few things for school and kept to light cleaning, waiting for July so I could attack.
         July hit and so did the purge. My bedroom has not been this clean since we moved in.
         And while finances prevent anything huge from happening, I have managed to switch out curtain rods, put up new curtains, throw out a dresser, gut and reorganize a closet and scrape off the 150 year old wallpaper from the girls' bathroom and get a start on a new coat of paint.
         This is not even a third of what needs to be done, but once I started Harper and Genoa had a babysitting job literally walk up to our front door and Genoa got a job at Kohl's.
          These things are related. If you dig out the crap you can allow the good stuff to emerge.
          I've known this for years, but I can be stubborn.
          And all this cleaning has freed up my mind a bit. Which is a nice change, I've been pretty wound up and cranky. Serious mental constipation. I just kept pushing to the next thing, thinking "I just have to get through this" and then it was on to the next thing.
           It had become increasingly difficult to pretend I was A) emotionally stable and B) not angry at the word. And as I was scraping the wallpaper today I realized that I am happier when I am emotionally unstable and angry. It is who I am. What was throwing me off and making me CRANKY was PRETENDING I am someone I am not because I was trying so hard to cover up what was going on. So I was pissed, but not for the right reasons!
           What a glorious revelation!
            I can now go back to actually being a cold hearted bitch instead of just saying it.
            FREEDOM!
            I had become this horrifying, passive aggressive, psuedo-accepting, nagging blob. So Gross. I was literally wandering around my classroom mumbling to myself by the end of the year about how much I hate these assholes.
            And now I feel I can fly the 'hawk at full mast and do what it is I love to do, the way it needs to be done, full speed ahead, take no prisoners, too bad so sad.
            So the next time some disrespectful student breaks my laptop, I won't just shrug and go cry in my office. I will scream at them, pack the broken laptop in their backpack and call home to explain to his parents that he will be bringing home a broken laptop and that I expect a new laptop to be returned to me.
           I just had to sit down and share this. I am too old to try to be someone I'm not, what the hell? No more mumbling. If you are an asshole they I am going to openly call you an asshole.
           Your self esteem is not my problem.

          Anyone else hear the Dead Kennedys playing in the background?

          YES. All right, I'm going back into the bathroom to finish the other half of the wallpaper. It is very hot in there with no airflow. Can you tell?