Kitchen painting time... ick

If you've ever been in my kitchen, you know it's a 1956, totally knotty pine-covered situation. Cabinets (which, by the way, are solid wood! Well constructed, but so plain...) and planked walls. Wood EVERYWHERE! Even Dad admitted that the overall orange look of the kitchen wasn't a good thing. I guess that's what varnish does after that many eons. I started out priming one set of cabinets the other night, thinking I could get away with not taking all the hardware off... Wrong.

So last night I started removing cabinet doors and hardware. My plan is to take a set of doors outside under the carport today and prime them all in an assembly line. At least I found a primer that lets me get away with not sanding. I discovered last year that sanding and then priming just makes the old stain bleed right through the new primer... To the tune of 5 coats of primer! Okay, so maybe Kilz 2 primer isn't the miracle that it's touted to be. I switched to Bullseye 1-2-3. (I would have used B-I-N, but they didn't sell it here at Wal-Mart. Maybe if I go to Lowe's for a 5 gallon bucket.... But will I need 5 gallons of high adhesion primer for the kitchen? I dunno.)

My sister has generously offered to come over and help me paint the entire kitchen one afternoon next week. I'm not sure how she thinks that's possible, considering that in her house, it took me, her husband, and her two boys an entire day to paint their living room... Just 2 coats of paint, no priming, and no hole-filling.... Okay, maybe she doesn't understand because she didn't actually help with any of the painting in her own house. Yours truly was the primary painter - I had nearly half of the living room painted before her husband got there, actually. (hoping for some good karma on that...) So you can probably understand why I've already started without her. Her expectations are a bit unrealistic.

What my kitchen requires in order to paint it:

• Moving out the refrigerator
• Moving out the washer
• Moving out the dryer
• Moving out the kitchen table
• Moving out the stoneware rack and baker's rack
• A thorough cleaning with ammonia,
• a thorough rinsing and then drying, of every wooden surface in the room.
• taping off anything I don't want painted
• Filling in old nail holes, scratches, gouges, and someone's growth charts on the door frame with wood filler.
• THEN, two coats of this special primer, with about an hour between coats for drying and setting time.
• THEN, we can paint.

Again, I'm not sure how she thinks that the two of us can accomplish this between 4:00 and 10:00 one day after work next week. Is there something I'm missing here? LOL It sounds to me more like a week's hard labor than an afternoon's light work. Of course, if I were to be brutally honest with her about this, she might never come over.

Update:

I have Dad's power drill and 2 batteries now... be afraid... be VERY AFRAID!!!! LOL (And Dad and my brother both said they'd help me if I asked.... They're sure I'll need help rehanging the cabinet doors. They may be right. I may get the cabinets painted and decide I need all new hardware....)

2nd update:

Darn it! I thought I could speed paint by setting up a work area under the carport and painting all the cabinet doors (for one section) at once - but NOOOOOO. It started raining and the temperature started dropping. It's getting downright cold out there! Now the primer doesn't feel like it's going to dry any time soon and I can't move forward. I think I'm going to go buy some decent drop cloths and turn my living room into a painting room.

National Scrapbook Day - Digitals Scrapbook Week Celebration!

Wow!!! Lots going on today in the digital scrapping world! Today is National Scrapbook Day, and almost everything I've got for sale in the stores is on sale for some ridiculously low prices! LOL I've donated a $5 coupon for a crop prize at SBB.

Everything at the SBB store is on sale, plus a 25% off coupon code which expires 5/8/06. Code: nsd06

Think that's good? How about GREAT???

Everything of mine at the Digitals store (excluding commercial licenses) is already on sale for 25% off! No special coupon code needed! If you win my coupon, you'll get 25% more, free! (I don't know about you, but getting something free, totally legal, is always cool with me! LOL)

Now, at Digitals we decided that celebrating for one single day just wasn't enough, so we've got lots of festivities all week long! For example, how would you like to get a HUGE MEGA KIT for FREE????

Read this thread for details on how you can download this entire Celebration Mega kit (250 Mb of designs) for free by attending 5 or more Digitals crops from May 6-12. It has tons of wonderful things to scrap with!

I personally contributed 38 backgrounds to this kit, and if you keep checking back to our Daily Downloads section this week, you can pick up an additional 2 backgrounds I created for the kit -- not to mention lots of wonderful extras from other great designers!

Please remember to send your friends directly to the site for the downloads!

At last a decent shower... I hope...

Okay... I tried two nights in a row to do the "baggie full of vinegar around the shower head" thing to unclog the doggone shower head. It was only halfway spraying, and it was taking me twice as long to get the soap off me and out of my hair. Forget the fact that showering stopped being enjoyable years ago in this house.

Tonight I took the showerhead off and tried boiling it in vinegar to get the gunk out. Did I mention that I have hard water? (No water softeners for me, thanks. I hate slimy showers even worse.) The only stuff that came off or out looked to be the remains of old plumber's putty.

Well, that aggravated me and I decided to put the stupid cheap thing back up with my trusty new insulated channel-lock pliers (and I did get a decent pair, according to Dad) that I bought last night. I thought I'd just go tomorrow and buy a new one to replace it and save myself the frustration. Wrong. Not only could I not get the stupid old showerhead back on completely, but it leaked when I was finished and water wouldn't completely come through the showerhead anymore. There was no way I would be able to shower under it this way. By the way, this shower head was so cheap that it was a one piece plastic thing. There wasn't even any way I could take it apart and poke a wire through the holes to get the stuff out of it. In fact, there weren't any holes that I could find. It wasn't made that way.

Of course, I didn't install this showerhead. It was here when I bought the house. Obviously, whoever bought it was more interested in saving a few dollars than getting something that functioned well.

I was so angry I nearly cried. So I did the only thing I could think of to do at 10 pm on a school night. I called my Dad and begged him for help. When he came over a little while later, his brief assessment was that I probably should replace the showerhead. I think it surprised him that I was thrilled by that answer.

We headed straight to the evil Wal-Mart and I picked out a nice Peerless one for $30 that has a handheld unit with it, and 7 massage settings. I figured it would come in handy for washing the tub, giving Terra a bath... lots of things like that. He pointed out the replacement showerheads that looked an awful lot like the one I was replacing... THEY WERE $1.96 EACH! I know somebody out there is rejoicing over a showerhead that cheap, but when you can't get water to come through it, that's $1.96 too much for them.

I even had Teflon tape in my toolbox already, because of the dumb ex-boyfriend who insisted I buy it so that he could fix my leaky kitchen sink... and he never did. LOL I can't tell that it's leaky... I think there might be a slight condensation problem, but I wouldn't call it a leak. I'll bet that my putting in that shelving unit under the sink probably cut down on the condensation hanging around too.

Anyway, Dad took about 10 minutes to install the new shower for me, and when he finished, the showerhead was literally 8 feet over the shower floor. (I'm only 5'5"!) For a split second I pictured myself trying to reach the controls on tiptoes. Then I realized that he had left the whole thing tilted upward for a laugh. Ha ha, always laughing at the short woman! LOL

It's actually in a better position for showering than the old one was. At least now I won't have to scoot back against the wall to get under the spray. And it's got some rubber jets that you can supposedly flex to break loose mineral deposits. I hope that works.

I am soooo tempted to take a shower before I go to bed, just to try it out, of course. :) But for some strange reason, I'm feeling kind of shy about doing that. Strange thought, isn't it? Maybe it'll make this pain in my kidneys go away for a little while.

Wow! 19 days of school left!

I'm sitting here eating my favorite thing in the world... Plain Hershey bar... just letting it melt on my tongue, piece by piece. :D Because it wouldn't be a good thing to just gobble it up. You have to really savor it. MMMMMM (So if anybody out there is ever in need of an idea for a simple "just because" gift for me when you're dropping by, chocolate is always appreciated. LOL)

Personally, I just think that when you put almonds and other stuff in Hershey bars, you're polluting them. I'd rather have plain M&M's, too.

Before anybody thinks about giving me a lecture about it... just remember... chocolate is good for the soul. :) And if you don't believe me, I can tell you that it's the fastest-acting antidepressant I've ever had. LOL Wanna get me happy and influence me to do questionable things? Feed me chocolate!

I can't believe there are only 19 more days of school left in this school year... so close, and yet so far away. Only 4 weeks till the end... and you know what THAT means... only 10 weeks until the start of the next school year. Well, there went MY summer vacation! You know what they say about wishing your life away? I've been preparing for the end of the school year since January - cleaning out my files and drawers, copying off papers to last me till the end of this year and into the beginning of next year... making plans for next year. Organizing things.

The thing is, we'll only have one day at the end of the school year to average grades, fill out permanent records, AND pack up our classrooms for moving out. (They make us do that EVERY year so they can strip and wax the floors.) I got really angry when one of the custodians came into my room and started harassing me about packing the MINUTE the kids left my room and I was trying to grade exams and finish averages. Somehow, I just think getting my kids moved on to the high school is about a million times more important than bowing to his demands. I almost sicced the curriculum coordinator on him. Hey, she told me I could.

I was about to go off on him (and that's really not like me) if he came in and bothered me again. I got my revenge though. Since he wouldn't give me time to clean up, I just loaded EVERYTHING into my tall 4 drawer filing cabinet... and he had to move it out into the hallway about 40 feet away. LOL I told him that if he'd just given me some space and time, I would have had a chance to lighten it, but noooo, he wouldn't stay off my case long enough for me to do anything but cram it full.

Honestly, though, I arranged things so that most of my stuff, textbooks included, didn't leave our team area. Only my big pieces of furniture got moved. I stacked everything else up on the counters and tops of the cabinets in my classroom, and jam packed the computer desks in the team area with tons of other things. It was nice not to have to go down the hall to the book room to move my stuff back in the first couple of days of school.

Last year we had 2 days... This year we have ONE. That's why I started in January.

Yikes, I need to start working on my final exam!

Eek! I should be in bed!

I started priming my kitchen cabinets last night. I've been looking at the can of primer and the painting stuff in my kitchen floor for about 3 weeks now, dreading starting. So I did the only thing I could think of to force myself to commit to the job: I went ahead and started two cabinets. So now I HAVE to finish the rest of the cabinets, or it'll all look awful.

Yes, I'll admit that I played a mind game with myself, against my own procrastination. I feel better now that I've started. hehehe I think I even found the color of buttery yellow paint that I want to paint them: "Mangrove Yellow." Then... the rest of the knotty pine kitchen... Even Dad agreed that though the primer coat currently looks awful (I guess he didn't realize there was only ONE coat at the time!), it had already brightened up the kitchen a whoooole lot. Maybe if I get it all brightened up in there, SOMEONE will remember his promise to help me put in new floors.

Want to know something strange about me? When I was a little girl, I always wanted my bedroom to be painted yellow. I knew it would make me feel more cheerful to be in a bright, sunny room. Yellow made me HAPPY, especially when the sun came up shining right into my bedroom window. Which is, I'm certain, precisely the reason why my stepmother insisted on painting my bedroom gray when I was in high school. Gee, what teenage girl doesn't want a bedroom painted gray, with brown carpet, orange blinds (not my idea - she had NO taste!), and someone else's broken-down furniture and yard sale bedding?

Am I being ungrateful? After all, for the bedroom she frilled up for my dad and herself, she painted the walls pink, and got the plushest mauve carpet you've ever seen. I know it cost more than the rest of the carpet in the house..... She got special carpet for herself... we got something resembling artificial turf.

You know, this is the point in my life at which I have to look back with some serious regrets. And speaking as a nice, responsible teacher who has always been a nice, responsible girl, I have to say that I should have had some rebellious phase along about then and just done what I darn well pleased. I'm convinced that there's nothing that could have been taken away from me. All I was allowed to do was work and go to school, and occasionally go out on a date if it didn't interfere with my work schedule... When I got off work at 9:15, SHE still insisted my curfew was 10 or 10:30. (For pete's sake... you couldn't even go to a movie in that length of time!)

And for the record... I participate in charitable things because I want to... not because someone sends me an email at work and tells me they want me to cook dinner for someone else's family come Thursday. If I'd wanted to do that, I'd have signed up when they asked for volunteers. Cooking dinner for someone else's family will cost me more than my entire week's grocery bill. I'm getting darn sick and tired of the married people trying to tell me what to do. I felt like responding back and saying to this very rude person, "You've got a mortgage and all of the same bills that I do, I'm sure, but I'll bet your HUSBAND is a big help in paying for all of that. Consider that I have to pay all of my bills myself, and I don't have the luxury of having someone pay them for me." Good grief, most nights *I* don't eat dinner! Who is this woman to think that she can just tell me to cook dinner for someone else.

I'm sorry the other lady is incapacitated, but you know, her family is NOT, and I think it's a bit excessive to think that we should all be providing all the meals for them from now until some undetermined point in the future. It's been going on for over 2 months now already. Personally, I just can't afford to support someone else's family when I'm doing all I can to support myself.

(And by the way, the orchestrator of this whole thing is the same one who passed the hat around for something she wanted to take credit for, and when she didn't like the totals, sent her students around demanding more money because she didn't feel that we'd been generous enough. I wasn't going to be generous TWICE to the same family - knowing that insurance had already paid all of their bills.)

I'm also getting tired of getting invitations to baby and bridal showers for total strangers. I'd feel uncomfortable going to a shower for a person that I don't even know, so why am I expected to stay home but send a gift, again to someone who doesn't know me from Adam? If I ever get married or have a baby, are these strangers going to show up at showers for me? Of course not. LOL I'd be embarrassed to know that someone hosting a shower for me was sending gift requests to people I didn't even know! That takes a lot of nerve, don't you think?

All right, enough griping... I guess I just miss my cute fella. *sigh* I fall in love with the most inappropriate guys.... they never love me back. Figures.