Getting Ready To Leave
For instance, the trailer has a number of corrugated fiberglass panels on the back porch, put there by the previous owner to close everything in. I’ve never really cared for them and a few years back when we painted the singlewide, I just had them painted over to match the rest of the house. We mostly just use the back porch for our recycling containers, paper bags, and miscellany anyway. The agents thought it made things too dark back there and asked if we could replace the panels with something a little more see-through. Easy enough I thought, so Saturday morning I headed out to the hardware store and picked up the pieces to what I thought would be a relatively quick project.
Unfortunately it turned out to be not so easy. In fact it turned out to be a big ‘ol pain in the ass and by Sunday morning, when I was finished with the job, the job, unfortunately, was still not finished. In my frustration and desperate need to feel like I’d accomplished something, I decided to begin another project we’d been asked to do -- that was to start painting the basement bathroom.
If I’ve never mentioned the fact that we have a basement bathroom in my forum before, it’s simply because it is never used. It seemed like a quick-and-easy, one of those two or three hour job, tops. It had been painted a fleshy pink, and the cement floor, a very chipped and faded red. Someone had once taken a silver can of spray paint and painted odd lines and pictures on the wall and ceiling, the later of which has a big hole ripped in it. There are no baseboards, and the one dirty closet it has, a previous owner had used as a grow room. Next to the un-working sink is a toilet that has a tendency to leak. Up to now, I’ve always taken the most logical approach to this abhorrent washroom appendage and that’s to simply shut the door, but it’s pretty clear that this approach wasn’t going to pass muster if we were gonna get our real estate agents to remain on speaking terms, and anyway, it beat standing out in the cold cutting fiberglass with a circular saw, so start painting it I did.
It was slow, slow going. Seems that the fleshy pink paint didn’t like to be painted white all that much since it became apparent early on, that this new project was going to take multiple coats and by extension, more than one day for me to complete alone. Sweetie had taken it upon herself to start caulking in and around the upstairs bathroom tub, but after I returned from my third or fourth trip from the hardware store, the caulk gun was starting to get the better of her. The tub has some hard to reach areas between it and the sink that doesn’t allow the use of a caulking gun and after a while the whole thing had become a messy disaster.
The weekend was quickly spiraling out of control and I had visions of an entire two days worth of work with nothing actually getting finished smack-dab in the center in my vision. It had to stop.
While Sweetie cleaned the silicone out of her nails, teeth and hair, I set about getting the rest of the tub caulked. She wasn’t too happy about how it turned out, but the end result was that we managed to at least get it done, and by extension, move on to the next project.
From there, we both moved downstairs to finish tackling the basement bathroom. By the end of the day, we had finished painting the walls and floor and were just waiting for everything to dry before applying the lovely tan vinyl base strip that would signal the project finished.
Next weekend I have more fiberglass to measure, cut and caulk, stairs to paint, basements to clean and crap to get rid of. I am trying desperately not to get drowned in the tidal wave of junk I need to deal with, but right now I feel like I’m bailing out a row boat with a leaky Dixie cup.
I know, I know…
Little steps…little, little steps.
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