Extreme Home Breakdown

It’s been a busy weekend at the Franks household.  So busy, in fact, that coming back to the Grand Central Station we call the Summit offices is looking pretty dang good.

This was the weekend that I’ve known was coming for several weeks now.  Back in December, my bride informed me that we would be doing “a little painting” after the first of the year.  No amount of pleading, cajoling, or trying to enroll myself in the witness protection program kept me from this most odious of tasks.  We have five rooms total that we will be tackling; this weekend was the first three: our master bedroom and bath, and the kids’ bathroom.

I’m convinced that home builders – when they are not sitting around talking about joists and vapor barriers – partner with Satan himself to figure out how to make the future homeowner the most miserable.  Take, for example, the painting of a bathroom.  Non-pagan, Christian homebuilders would have installed toilets that would lean forward at an angle, thereby allowing you to paint behind them without placing your head in a Very Unclean Space.  But no, the Lucifer Alliance that built our house installed a standard toilet, which means that there were several times this weekend that I was embracing the entry point to a sewage system.  Many times when I was painting, I had the very distinct, very disturbing thought: “My head is laying where my rear end was sitting just minutes ago.”

Editor’s note: Dude.  Seriously?

Gross, but true. 

And as much as I hate to write this next part, in the spirit of the weekend play-by-play I must.  I think that my wife might have a role in the Lucifer Alliance.  When we opened up the paint can for the bedroom, I couldn’t help but notice a striking resemblance between the color of the paint in the can and the color of the paint already on the walls.

Me: Um, honey?  This paint that I’m putting on the walls…the paint that I just spent an hour pulling every muscle in my body moving bedroom furniture and putting that blue tape on everything for…isn’t it exactly the same color as what we already have?

Merriem: No, sweetheart honey bunches. (At least I think that’s what she called me.) The old paint was South Asian Rainforest Bamboo.  This is very clearly Southeast Asian Dry Arid Tundra Bamboo.  Of course it’s a different color.

Me: But really…I’m looking at it right now, and with the naked eye I can’t tell where the old paint ends and the new paint begins.

Merriem: But sugarplum hot britches, (I’m almost positive those were her words.) The Dry Arid Tundra Bamboo brings out the brown in the new comforter.  You DO see that, don’t you?

…and on it went, until I realized if I ever wanted to sleep under the new comforter, I had better agree.

The most fun part of the weekend was painting over our bathroom.  A few years back we painted the bathroom red.  Not just red.  It was Torpedo Just Went Through Your Main Artery Red.  It was so red that as I was hunkered down with my head wedged behind the toilet, I found Bob the Tomato and his entire family had been hiding out in there for months, scavenging breath mints out of my sink drawer and occasionally wearing my warm up pants.  We had never seen him because – after all – he blended.

But it was time for the red to go.  Merriem had come to question the red.  She suspected the red. She was certain that the red was absolutely what has kept our house from selling.  It was what burned out the retinas of any potential buyer.  It was responsible for the collapse of the American real estate market.

So we painted over the red.  The bathroom is now a lovely Bolivian Winter Mellow Avocado, or something like that.  And as soon as the last coat was applied, my wife – the woman I love – said, “I miss the red.”

It’s a good thing she’s so cute, because otherwise, I think I could have stuffed her into the paint can.