After the Pigfest 2008 that yesterday was (I'll write more about Thanksgiving later--a full-length entry about my family will take more time, and wine, than I can pour into it right now), Lawyer Boy and I kicked off the holiday season today the way many people do: we started our holiday cooking. By cooking the hardware for all the doors in our bedroom.
By way of quick and dirty background, Lawyer Boy and I recently bought a great house that was built in 1930. The house has been entirely untouched since the glory days of Prohibition, and so a lot of people who've come by have called it "a diamond in the rough." I just call it "effin' ugly." The entire interior of the house was painted institutional mint green, which has driven us crazier than Miley Cyrus ever could hope to. Mint green. I can’t wait to (never ever ever so help me Baby Jesus in the manger) see you again.* It’s an awesome house, but it needs help, as did the original owners when they lacked all sense and reason and painted over every single doorknob, hinge, outlet, and light switch cover in the entire house. Sparkly glass doorknobs? Lovingly glazed with mint green. Solid brass hinges? Beautifully highlighted with EFFING MINT GREEN. So in trying to rid the house of the Great Depression, we had to take apart all the working parts of the doors and get the nasty lead paint off all of them.
And when I say “we,” I mean Lawyer Boy. So far we’ve only made it through the doors in our bedroom, but since he can actually tell a screw from a hinge**, he was charged with taking them apart, after which he laid at my feet a billion sticky, gunky pieces of brass, like so many preschoolers’ fingers.*** We had been told that the best way to strip off old paint from metal was to boil the pieces with a little detergent, so we sacrificed one of our soup pots and set that bitch to roast.
Word to the wise: NEVER BOIL SOAP IN YOUR HOUSE ON PURPOSE, no matter how tempted you may be by the delicious scents they put in the dish soap. (I get that—I too have been tempted by Dawn’s Country Apple.) It smells like death and bad breath and is DISGUSTING. Also I can’t imagine what kind of lethal chemicals I inhaled today. I keep waiting to grow a third eye out the side of my head, which is kind of exciting, except my hair is very thick, so it’s unlikely that I would be able to see out of it. Anyway, we boiled the paint off, and after two hours of scrubbing, rubbing, and emptying six bottles of Brasso****, we had shiny, original hardware, which meant we could move onto our next project: Kilz-ing the living room.
Kilz is a nasty chemical that is somehow still the BOMB. It kilz stuff like mildew leftover from WWII and serves as primer, and makes you feel like maybe, one day, your whole house won’t be seafoam green like a bad bridesmaids’ dress. Putting Kilz on the walls is actually a very cleansing process, not unlike a baptism at church, after which they give you delicious wine. Except at my house/church, they don’t make you sit through the baptism, and only then give you the wine as a reward for sitting through it. Here at the
Slowly but surely, we’re moving along. While everyone else is buying six big-screens on sale at Wal-Mart and making turkey con carne al dente a la francais out of yesterday’s leftovers, Lawyer Boy and I are proudly getting in the spirit by getting high off chemicals that you, too, can purchase at the grocery store! We’ve got brand names, if you’re interested. I'm just sayin.
So I leave you now with the warmest of holiday tidings, as I go forth to continue my holiday cooking. Tomorrow’s recipe: peanut butter cheesecake with chocolate-mint paint glaze.
*Why yes, that song IS on my ipod! Right between Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” and
**I can tell a screw from a hinge, but only when presented to me in the context of a cocktail. Like I know there’s no such thing as a “hingedriver.”
***Have you ever held hands with a preschooler? So you know what I’m talking about with the gunk and slime and possibly ebola therein.
****I don’t normally give financial advice, but y’all, buy stock in Brasso. Based on our consumption alone, they’re gonna do some mad crazy business in the next quarter, and I recommend you get in while you can.
3 comments:
maybe you'll luck out and that third eye will be on a stalk, so it'll poke through your hair ...
verification word of the day: "hagga". plural of "haggis".
(the previous post was removed because of a really bad typo, and you can't just edit your post, you have to remove it. sigh.)
Ungly (verb): to make un-ugly someone or something, interchangeable with the word "prettify"
Example: Blogger attempts to ungly the horrifying paint job in her Great Depression era home.
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