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Alternately titled: Home Project Fail

Alternately titled: Oops

Alternately titled: Piece ‘o Cake my #$*

Alternately titled: This is what happens when I try to be Martha Stewart

Alternately titled: I picked the wrong day to stop drinking

Alternately titled: Back to the drawing board?

Alternately titled: This is why Pinterest makes people like me feel inadequate

I am a writer. That’s what I do. I paint blank pages with words and form pictures of the mind. I embrace this part of who I am because I’m good at it. I love words. I get words.

I DO NOT GET DECORATING.

While I can paint a word picture and visualize that which I am creating, I cannot visualize the blank canvas of a wall. I cannot use an actual paintbrush without mostly disasterous results. Perhaps you think I am exaggerating? Perhaps you worry I am being dramatic for the purposes of this blog post.

I assure you, I am not.

I took your suggestions from the other day regarding curtains. I went to Michaels on Saturday and picked out a spray paint that matched the vibrant red in my bedding perfectly. Yesterday, I went to IKEA and I bought some neutral curtains, per the advice of many of you who suggested I not go too crazy with the colors in the fabric.

I came home armed and ready. I pulled up a few links on how to spray paint something, grabbed a few supplies and headed outside with my curtain rods, some primer and a can of spray paint.

I started off by priming the curtain rods because everything I read said to spray a white canvas in order to get a true showing of the spray paint color. It didn’t take me long and I leaned the rods up against a wall to dry.

Piece ‘o cake.

An hour later I went out with my spray paint, shook it up and began spraying the rods. This is where it all started to go down hill.

First, I didn’t realize the importance of covering the rods completely with the primer. I kind of treated it like I would a wall and didn’t worry about the few spots that I missed or the fact that the rod wasn’t a solid white. But when I sprayed the rod, you could see all the places where the rods were darker.

Fail.

So after spraying one rod and one finial and seeing how bad they looked, I grabbed the primer and decided to apply a second coat so that the rods would be solid white.

While I was doing this I was attacked. No lie. Some sort of mutant horse fly (or maybe even a tracker jacker) came out of nowhere and laid seige to my legs. I swatted and screamed and ran and in the process of doing so flung paint all over the place.

Honestly, I really feel this was a sign from the Lord to stop doing what I was doing and go inside and eat pizza. I should have heeded the warning, but I did not. I waited a few minutes, assuming the tracker horse fly jacker was gone, then ventured back out to finish priming.

HE ATTACKED ME AGAIN!

He bit me six times and my ankles swelled up to twice their normal size.

At that point, I called it a day and laid the rods up against a piece of carboard that I’d propped against our tree. I figured I’d let them dry then wait a day before attempting to spray paint.

I checked on those rods no less than six times over the course of the next hour and they sat propped proudly against the tree. We put the kids to bed and I headed out to gather what I assumed to be my now dry rods.

W-R-O-N-G.

They had fallen over. A single, mysterious gust of wind blew through bewteen the time of my last glance out the window and this moment and they laid askew in the grass and leaves and they weren’t totally dry.

You know, maybe it wasn’t the wind. Maybe it was that devil tracker horse fly jacker that knocked them over.

At any rate, I brought them all in, threw them down on the back porch and walked inside. I was swollen, itchy, covered in paint and dirt and altogether irritable. Lee looked at me with wide, amused eyes.

“Didn’t go so well, huh?” he asked.

“Well, at least I’ll get a good blog post out of it,” I muttered.

So now I have a decision to make. Do I try again? Do I go out and buy new curtain rods that are already white? Or do I throw in the towel, return those cans of spray paint and stay away from Pinterest from now until forever?

I think I’ll wait for the swelling in my ankles to go down to decide…

You’re welcome to offer suggestions in the comments. And you’re more than welcome to laugh at me. But if any of you use the words “piece ‘o cake,” “simple,” or “lickety split” in regards to this project I will sic my devil tracker horse fly jacker upon you with a vengence.

Deal?

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