In Which We Watch Paint Dry (II)
Aug. 18th, 2019 01:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aSecond verse, same as the first, but a little bit louder and a little bit worse!
So we had our second full week of house painting this last week, taking us to 13 days of waking up early and interacting with our painting crew in some way. We're exhausted.
(Though two days of weekend has helped me at least.)
As we expected, during this second full week our painters were no longer working fully in the house, so there was less disruption to our life in some ways. But there was more disruption (and discomfort!) in other ways.
The big problem was that we slowly lost our windows over the course of the week. Over last weekend, our windows were all glazed, which means they looked cracked and spiderwebby (but more notably were protected against paint). Then early this week the windows started getting covered by plastic. Pretty soon, the only free windows we had were on the east side of the house where we had the work all done first due to our narcissistic and highly entitled neighbors (more on them soon! Joy!).
Worse, we had a heat wave last week, making it one of the hottest weeks of the year. So if you imagine our house as stuffy and uncomfortable all week long, you have it right.
Because of all of this, my office continued to be largely unusable. Its southern windows are covered with plastic, its northern windows are partially painted shut, and what was left couldn't keep it cool. So I was again consigned to our art/junk/former-guest room.
Except on the days they were spraying paint right outside. Which was two different days: one for the windows, one for the walls itself. I wasn't going to keep myself and the cats in a room with single pane windows where they were spraying paint right outside. So we retreated to my hot office. Except one of the days it was so hot back there (probably +10 to +15 the actual 85-90 degrees outside) that I was worrying about the' cats health, so we eventually retreated to the bedroom, and I did part of the work day sitting on the bed with my laptop in my lap.
Good times.
And then there were the neighbors. We thought we were through with them after completing the main painting on that side of the house last week, but they (she, really) ended up throwing two different fits.
First, she threw a fit when she saw them prepping out kitchen window for staining, because it's a special bay window that's all framed in unpainted wood on the outside. She demanded that we cover her house again because of the high danger of stain fumes on the other side of their walkway, up in their house, and that we give them 2-3 days notice of doing that work and/or do it on a cool day. Fortunately, this was Thursday, and the painters had already planned it for Monday, so I told her Monday, and all was well (maybe). Then there was a second fit the next day because the painters were spraying the front of our house and she felt that the coverings that they were carefully managing to control the blow of paint weren't tight enough and were going to impact her house 20 feet away.
The thing that pissed both Kimberly and me off the most was that she accosted our workers both time, instead of texting me or call our home number.
Tomorrow we get the joy of waking up, and discovering if they've created another 8am key crisis by not leaving out the key that we need to get to their walkway to cover their windows as they have asked (a crisis that they've already created twice, once the previous Monday, once the previous Thursday, which means they managed to get it right exactly two days out of four, and suggests we have at best 50/50 odds tomorrow).
But, we're getting really close. Staining tomorrow, and some work unsticking those sunroom windows, and general cleanup to get all the painting details on the trim where something is slightly off right. Maybe into Tuesday.
When we decided to take on this painting job, we based it almost entirely on the price tag. It came in at about 1% of the expected sale price of our house, and we thought it might increase the value by that or more. What we didn't price out was the emotional and mental wear and tear. I mean, we knew that having workers about the house for more than two weeks would be tiring. But I hadn't expected to have my office unavailable for two weeks, I hadn't expected to be moving from room to room like an office nomad, I hadn't expected our house to be stifling during a heatwave, and I hadn't expected our neighbors to be prima donna assholes. I'm not sure we would have done it if we'd realized how taxing it would be.
But one or two days left.
And the house will look nice; maybe we'll increase our sale value; and we'll have left the neighborhood better than we found it. (Generally the case: we've done a lot of good work on this house over the last twenty years, despite being somewhat negligent homeowners in some ways.)
So we had our second full week of house painting this last week, taking us to 13 days of waking up early and interacting with our painting crew in some way. We're exhausted.
(Though two days of weekend has helped me at least.)
As we expected, during this second full week our painters were no longer working fully in the house, so there was less disruption to our life in some ways. But there was more disruption (and discomfort!) in other ways.
The big problem was that we slowly lost our windows over the course of the week. Over last weekend, our windows were all glazed, which means they looked cracked and spiderwebby (but more notably were protected against paint). Then early this week the windows started getting covered by plastic. Pretty soon, the only free windows we had were on the east side of the house where we had the work all done first due to our narcissistic and highly entitled neighbors (more on them soon! Joy!).
Worse, we had a heat wave last week, making it one of the hottest weeks of the year. So if you imagine our house as stuffy and uncomfortable all week long, you have it right.
Because of all of this, my office continued to be largely unusable. Its southern windows are covered with plastic, its northern windows are partially painted shut, and what was left couldn't keep it cool. So I was again consigned to our art/junk/former-guest room.
Except on the days they were spraying paint right outside. Which was two different days: one for the windows, one for the walls itself. I wasn't going to keep myself and the cats in a room with single pane windows where they were spraying paint right outside. So we retreated to my hot office. Except one of the days it was so hot back there (probably +10 to +15 the actual 85-90 degrees outside) that I was worrying about the' cats health, so we eventually retreated to the bedroom, and I did part of the work day sitting on the bed with my laptop in my lap.
Good times.
And then there were the neighbors. We thought we were through with them after completing the main painting on that side of the house last week, but they (she, really) ended up throwing two different fits.
First, she threw a fit when she saw them prepping out kitchen window for staining, because it's a special bay window that's all framed in unpainted wood on the outside. She demanded that we cover her house again because of the high danger of stain fumes on the other side of their walkway, up in their house, and that we give them 2-3 days notice of doing that work and/or do it on a cool day. Fortunately, this was Thursday, and the painters had already planned it for Monday, so I told her Monday, and all was well (maybe). Then there was a second fit the next day because the painters were spraying the front of our house and she felt that the coverings that they were carefully managing to control the blow of paint weren't tight enough and were going to impact her house 20 feet away.
The thing that pissed both Kimberly and me off the most was that she accosted our workers both time, instead of texting me or call our home number.
Tomorrow we get the joy of waking up, and discovering if they've created another 8am key crisis by not leaving out the key that we need to get to their walkway to cover their windows as they have asked (a crisis that they've already created twice, once the previous Monday, once the previous Thursday, which means they managed to get it right exactly two days out of four, and suggests we have at best 50/50 odds tomorrow).
But, we're getting really close. Staining tomorrow, and some work unsticking those sunroom windows, and general cleanup to get all the painting details on the trim where something is slightly off right. Maybe into Tuesday.
When we decided to take on this painting job, we based it almost entirely on the price tag. It came in at about 1% of the expected sale price of our house, and we thought it might increase the value by that or more. What we didn't price out was the emotional and mental wear and tear. I mean, we knew that having workers about the house for more than two weeks would be tiring. But I hadn't expected to have my office unavailable for two weeks, I hadn't expected to be moving from room to room like an office nomad, I hadn't expected our house to be stifling during a heatwave, and I hadn't expected our neighbors to be prima donna assholes. I'm not sure we would have done it if we'd realized how taxing it would be.
But one or two days left.
And the house will look nice; maybe we'll increase our sale value; and we'll have left the neighborhood better than we found it. (Generally the case: we've done a lot of good work on this house over the last twenty years, despite being somewhat negligent homeowners in some ways.)