I have a hangover

A good weekend of home improvement is like a good workout. You might have physical pain after doing it but you know you’ve accomplished something and you feel somewhat invigorated having done so.

I am having what I am now calling a "DIY hangover". My back hurts, the projects and experiments that I took on didn’t go quite right, and the weekend was filled with so many non-home-related things that I couldn’t truly focus on getting anything done. I don't feel like I accomplished anything and the sore back I have feels less than invigorating. To make matters worse, the bed, the reason we are renovating this room, arrives next Saturday. I just don’t feel great about this last weekend and needless to say, we won’t be setting up the bed just yet.

I had a feeling this weekend would go like this when, almost as a prelude, we experienced an almost catastrophic plumbing issue in the basement on Wednesday. Luckily we have no lasting water damage from it and the problem was resolved with a re-rodding of our sewer line. I had hoped to get some work done this week in prep for the weekend. That did not happen due to the plumbing.

The weekend arrived and I am glad to say I am almost finished with the bedroom door. Sadly, this is the only thing I accomplished over the weekend. I hope to put the first coat of oil on it tonight and get it back into place. Unfortunately, I think it looks a little strange. I decided to experiment and use a pre-stain wood conditioner on the door in the hopes of evening out the final finish. I think that it actually makes the stain look even splotchier than if I had not applied it. Oh, well, the surface is only visible from the bedroom and it will be dark in there so no great loss. What is done is done.

Working on the door was frustrating. Yes, it took a long time but what was really frustrating was where I worked on it. I decided to stage all of my work on the door in my front porch. This was a bad idea as all it did was distract me. I really like the porch but hate how it feels. Working in there, I felt like I was reminded more and more about why the room feels so uncomfortable. At some point on Saturday it hit me, the colors in this room are terrible: a stark white and an odd blue green (not very bungalow-ey). So while working on the door, all I could think about was re-painting this room.

This weekend, we also decided to take on some more of the details in the bedroom. My wife got into the act by beginning to strip the register for the bedroom. Why the hell these were painted, I don’t know – they look stupid as the white color makes them stick out in the room even more than if they were plain metal or a dark color. By the way, they are like this in EVERY room. A nice discovery though: it appears that these were originally plated with brass, like the hardware on the doors. Unfortunately not enough of the plating is left to make it worth salvaging. It presents the problem of what we do with them now. I am thinking of buying some faux metallic spray paint and trying it out to see what it looks like. Something tells me this is not a good idea.

There was one bright spot to the weekend’s work. I picked up our rain barrels. I think they will be great if I ever get the time to install them properly. For now, I figure I would leave them out back to make friends with my daughter’s play set. They really add to the white-trash ambience that is our backyard and they should get along. After all, they are all made of plastic.