Stupid Tired

[before]

We keep waking up soooper tired. So tired that even when we wake up after 7 or 8 hours in bed, we feel like we could sleep all day. I wonder if there's a carbon monoxide leak somewhere, but I'm too tired to find the detector.

I was so tired this morning that after looking inside two different boxes of cereal only to see the bags inside closed up with a "chip clip," I had toast.

It was way too much work to reach inside the box, undo the clip and unroll the plastic bag. Not to mention having to find a bowl, pour the cereal into it, then walk ALL THE WAY over to the fridge - christ, I'm exhausted all over again just thinking about it.

The painting of the soon-to-be-former-blue room has taken nearly a decade, when you include all the years I've wanted to paint it but never made the time. Since before we moved in I've wanted that sad, dreary color sandblasted off those walls.

Well, it's finally happening. After two years off & on - mostly off - as of today we have:

• stripped the window trim & doors (done two years ago!)
  
• spackled four hundred tiny cracks in the plaster walls and ceiling
• built a proper frame for the access "door" I made to repair the wall the plumbers cut open years ago to fix broken shower pipes
• sanded more than we wanted to (mmm... lead paint)
  
• made & vacuumed up enough dust to clog the estuary
• ripped out all the window caulking (something we get to redo when we're done painting - yay!)
  
• TSPed top to bottom (though, not the ceiling, 'cause who gives a shit if there's stain on the ceiling - there's nothing up there I need to look at)
• slapped two coats of primer all over that goddamm room

This room has been the worst - way worse than a much larger room where we removed all the wallpaper. Not sure why. I think there's a ghost in there that really loves that shitty color.

Everything takes five times longer than you think it will and now there's a part of one wall where the old paint started peeling up as soon as the primer hit it, so we have to go back & scrape all that off as best we can without destroying the 100-year-old plaster, then hope the primer sticks.

But - BUT - once that's done, the new paint is going up. A warm, inviting, cozy color... dare I say it, something pleasing to the eye. I'm not sure I'll believe it until I see it, on the walls, in real life, instead of tiny paint chips taped onto the wall.

Then, we're gonna move a Barcalounger in there and I'm going to curl up in it and sleep there for seven years.

Redesigning a House

So yesterday after breakfast I asked David if he wanted to hear my ideas for redesigning the house - my virtual tour of what could be - and for the most part, he thought it all made sense.

But boys are different than girls - especially when it comes to redesigning a house.

He thought the master bedroom would make a really great office - for him. It's the second largest room in the house - a nice big, square room that would make an ideal kitchen (compared to the glorified hallway kitchen we have now), providing ample room for long counters, cabinets, and a center island cook/work station.

Or, it would make an ideal boy's office/play room, with ample room for his big corner desk & cabinets, and the game set up on the other side. I can imagine what he's thinking and he's right - anyone would love an office that big. And it's right next to the bathroom - bonus!

But since we don't have a nice big budget or a team of workers, we reorganized the living room instead. This is always fun because he always comes up with an idea I didn't think of.

The trick is maintaining focus - not changing main goal of the room as we go - because sometimes his ideas drift into the land of "ultimate play space," which I think he would like to incorporate into every room in the house.

The one idea he had that I wasn't sure about ended up to be a great solution. I'd almost totally shot down his idea, but he convinced me to try it out. As I moved my stuff around to accommodate the new layout, I said, "OK, I secretly love this." He secretly loved it, too.

And while it's fun to talk about all the changes we might make to this place, we also think about the ease of just moving to a house with a better layout and one without a mental case across the street. I think we're leaning toward the reduced mental case option.