Pictures of Painting

I forgot a few pictures yesterday.

First, here's a picture of the exterior of Jason's apartment.



I won't post pictures of the interior, mostly because it's not done yet. Once the art is up on the walls, I'm sure Jason will let you see it. In the meantime, you can see his initial move-in shots here.

The day we started painting was the day of the many, many errands. It included Ikea:


(I happened to capture the moment when Jason figured out he had left his measurements in the car. That, or it's the moment right before he pulls a weapon from his bag to kill me.)

It included this delicious lunch from a German bakery:




It included stopping at two different malls:




It included a phone call to Jason's mom for painting advice:


(His phone is on speaker in the sunglasses holder near the visor, if you're wondering.)


It in fact included so many purchases that we made use of the Old Lady Cart Jason keeps in his car:





Errands completed; on to painting!

First, we move the furniture:




Next, Jason checked the paint sample by taping it to the living room wall.  Then he painted a swatch.  Then he set one of each of the room's pillows next to the sample to check the color scheme:




Still not satisfied, he added a lampshade and the intended wall's main art piece:




It was at about this stage that I recognized that we were in the middle of Jason's Decision Analysis Cycle. After years of careful study, I have concluded that his cycle consists of the following steps:

1.Make a decision.
2. Question the decision.
3. Decide decision was a mistake.
4. Continue with the decision anyway.
5. Begin to like decision.
6. Conclude that decision was the best ever.


Around Step 4, we started painting.




Our progress after an hour:


(By the way, that green tape is Frog Tape.  It's awesome.  It seals really well and, as I discovered later in the week, its "water repellent barrier" also makes it a good medical tape for blistered feet.)


We finished the living room and tackled the bedroom the next day:



After the first coat:





So! We painted. The colors here are hardly accurate, since I'm shooting with my cell phone.  In case you're wondering (and I know you're just rivited by such an exciting Travel Tale as this one), the living room is "Carbon Dust" and the bedroom is "Woodpecker."

(When I stop being a teacher I want to be the person who names colors.  I have always thought that "Willy Loman Yellow" had a particularly nice ring to it.)

Jason had expressed grave concerns about painting the rooms ourselves before we began (see: Decision Analysis Cycle), given our lack of experience.

"I don't want to wind up with a yellow ceiling," he said, referring to the other time we painted a room together. (At the strike for Spinning Into Butter, Jason, Heidi, and I decided that Westminster's greenroom should actually be green instead of white-with-a-1/4-finished-mural-on-a-blue-wall. Three hours and two gallons of paint later, we decided that a yellow ceiling would also be a nice touch. It was around 2:00 in the morning by then, I believe. When he saw it Michael, the head of the theater department, came the closest to expressing displeasure as I've ever seen him do in his hippy way.  But to my knowledge, the Westminster Theater Greenroom remains green to this day.)

"Hey!" I said, "I've painted sets for dozens of shows."

"For plays," he scoffed. "That doesn't count."


Oh, speaking of painting, I forgot to include the picture of what the Blush 'n' Brush painting was supposed to look like:

And here again is my (incomplete) version:

Hm. Maybe Jason's right.  Again.


P.S. Remember the post about living monastically? Here's an illustrative picture:



Betcha can't guess which shelf in the bathroom is mine!