Projects I Will Soon Tire Of

I love a good project--craft project, not sketchy government housing. While I do consider myself at least somewhat creative, and start a variety of intriguing craft projects throughout the year, I am not exactly known for an unyielding tenacity* to stick with it till the end and finish the job. This explains the four half-scarves, one half of a baby blanket, and one sleeve of a sweater that I started knitting, only to get bored, go looking for snacks, and return to the projects six months later to discover that it was no longer scarf season, the baby was now a toddler, and I no longer felt that my wardrobe required a sage green sweater.

My completely ADD lifestyle wouldn't be quite so problematic if I didn't insist on starting every project that scampers through my brain like a deranged Martha Stewart, crooning siren songs of nubbly knitted blankets and hand-stamped monogrammed stationery. Do you know what concentration and skill it takes to create hand-stamped monogrammed stationery? Yeah, me neither. I totally bought the supplies, then lied down for a nap and awoke to a new me, one who did not give a crap about notecards any more. Whatever. Post-Its get the job done, the new me stated lazily.

So when I told Lawyer Boy last weekend that I wanted to sand and refinish our bedroom furniture, color me blown-away blue when he actually agreed to letting me take an orbital sander to the oak furniture his parents had given us. Maybe he's excited that I'm getting into power tools. Maybe he's thinking that this time, I'll stick with it till the touchdown dance in the end zone.

Maybe he thinks the furniture is as butt-fugly as I do.

Not that there's anything wrong with your bedroom looking like it belongs to a nine-year-old boy who loves camp-outs and digging for worms--if you are a nine-year-old boy who loves camp-outs and digging for worms. LB's parents had bought this furniture for him when he was in elementary school, and when he started Lawyer Boy School and had zero furniture to his name, they gave it to him for his apartment. As much as I'm not a huge screaming fan of this furniture, I have to admit that it was a step up from LB keeping his t-shirts rolled up like sushi in a Tupperware bin.

The furniture is boxy, chunky, and varnished a dark oak color. No, it is not the ubiquitous 80s-kids-bedroom cargo furniture that deserves only to be used for firewood. I stared at it, silently hating it and vowing to burn it like a witch at the stake, for years, until I finally realized: The furniture itself is not ugly. I don't like the color at all, but structurally, the furniture has an old-fashioned, wooden trunk-y look to it, which could play very well into the "French country romantic" theme that I'm allegedly using for our bedroom. I say allegedly, because right now all I've got is a chandelier, a fantasy, and a working knowledge of the words for many pieces of furniture in French.

So I thought to myself, "Grace, we are a crafty being. We have, at summer camp 12 years ago, painted picture frames with tempera paint and only gotten paint under six of our fingernails and on four other campers. We are, therefore, completely qualified to attack real furniture with violent weapons, and finger-paint colors onto it." I figured out what colors I would use, if I had grown-up paint skills, and took my proposal to LB.

No, I did not get him drunk before I asked him. Even sober, he was surprisingly amenable to the suggestion--probably because we are too cheap to buy entirely new bedroom furniture. We decided we would complete the entire project -sand, prime, paint, and crackle-coat paint- on the mirror that goes with the set first, so that if it wasn't actually a good idea, we could just set the mirror on fire, scatter the ashes to the wind, and pretend the whole thing never happened. If all goes well, the furniture will be painted espresso brown, with an ivory crackle-coat overtop that only vaguely resembles peeling sunburn.

If all does not go well, we'll have to confess to my mother-in-law, whom I love dearly, that we maybe-sort-of-on-accident ruined all the furniture, which she loves dearly. In that case, I will blame the whole thing on LB, since I will likely only be interested in this project for another .16 minutes of the 47 remaining hours of work we have left on it. Actions speak louder than words, amigos: If he was the one who carried out the bulk of the destruction, then the fact that I was the one to verbalize the plan in the first place means nothing.

I'm telling you all this so that, should you not hear from me again this weekend, you will know that the orbital sander won the battle and I am no longer an animate being with working fingers. Either that, or I sanded for five minutes, got bored, chased a butterfly through the yard, and headed off for a picnic, returning home later to the realization that I would much rather throw my own pottery than refinish furniture. I think we have some clay in the basement...and pottery wheels are on sale at Michael's right now...

*Dear Everyone Who Uses The Linguistic Abomination "stick-to-it-iveness": I would like to introduce you to the real English word that means the same thing. It is tenacity. Stick-to-it-iveness is not only cumbersome and annoying, it is unnecessary, as we have a word that has been blessed by Pope Merriam-Webster and legitimized into our language.

End grammatic rant.