Although sewing is a distraction from life, and a very welcome one at that, life itself seems to offer an endless variety of distractions from sewing: the following is one of them.
Distraction 725: Housepainting
Subsection A: foundation painting.
History: Having resided the house last year, and having admired how nice it looked, I could not help but notice how sad and pathetic the foundations looked in comparison. Now foundations are not usually a particularly noticeable thing, but my garage is below my house and as one goes down the ledge from the front door to the garage the foundation grows larger, eventually becoming the front of the garage. It is a typical foundation, concrete block covered by a layer of rough textured cement. The color of the cement is fairly close to the taupe-beige shade we stained the siding and is not in itself unattractive EXCEPT…..
In that little word, except, lies all the problems of life. I need to learn to ignore the exceptions, as in the house looks good except... The jacket is beautiful except… I love the way that sweater turned out except… you know the problem.
The concrete had never been painted and was its natural aged gray color. But it had crumbled over the years and in places the concrete blocks were showing. In other places it had been patched, more than once, and every new patch was a different shade of gray. It was not a pleasing patchwork like a crazy quilt, but rather more of a “I just can’t get it together” kind of patchwork, and since the garage and foundation are the first thing that anyone coming down my driveway sees, this unattractive feature had been preying on my mind.
The patching was all done over the summer and I had to let the concrete age until it could be painted. Technically this could have been done in September, but I was doing other things then and am just now getting to the task
It is a sunny week with temperatures in the mid to upper 60s. I thought I could prime and paint 378 square feet of foundation wall easily. Easier said than done. Mistaken assumptions abounded:
1. Paint coverage. The primer said it covered 500 square feet. I have 378. The first can got me through 96. Back at the paint store, the nice clerk said that of course for rough textured concrete that had been aged and never painted coverage would be more like 100 square feet. Duhh. I told the first clerk what I was painting, why didn’t he tell me that?
2. Painting rough concrete is very slow.
3. Painting is very hard on arthritic hands, especially when the arthritis is primarily in the metacarpal joints and first phalangeal joints, the ones used to grip the paintbrush. I guess it had been a few years since I had painted. I am much slower now.
4. Expect delays for unanticipated occurances like finding a hole under the concrete blocks running into the garage. Gee I guess that’s how the rat snake gets in my garage bay. Take time out to clean out, plug up, and seal the hole. Wait for concrete and caulk to dry so you can paint it.
I suspect my entire week will go along something like this.
At the moment, after spending hours painting the last thing my hands want to do is grip a pair of shears, or even a rotary cutter for that matter, so the cutting out has been delayed yet again.
Perhaps it is time to clean out the sewing room.