Putting the Pain in Painting

 

   Obviously, it needed to be done. Note the ancient light fixture and dingy grey walls.

Winter has set in, and attention here at Surbiton Manor moved indoors with us. 

With a few extra days off over the holidays, I thought it would be fun to paint the lower-level bathroom. Not exactly "fun" in the traditional sense, but memory of what it feels like to "have painted" and a frustration with the dingy grey that the Hated Previous Owners (HPOs) coated the entire interior of the house in made it sound like it would eventually be fun.

While that all turned out to be true, the actual process of paintING is horrible. When you are on coat 5 of white paint on a once grey door, regret sets in. Though, as the Butthole Surfers remind us on their classic album Locust Abortion Technician, "The funny thing about regret is that it's always better to regret something you have done than something you haven't done."

My usual 

Before

After Half a Gallon of Paint and Half a Day of Effort

My usual guideline with any sort of home improvement is that it will cost 2x as much as I think initially, and take 3x as long to complete.

In this case, the budget was spot on, but the labor was at least 5x as much as I thought it would be. 

Particularly, I was expecting the light fixture replacement to be relatively easy. Take down the old horrible 1980's painted white one left by the HPOs, put up the nice, modern, energy-saving LED strip.

Like the Spanish Inquisition, no-one expects the wires to not be centered over the vanity, but instead to be high and to the left, attached by a make-shift length of wire jury-rigged together with electrical tape. 

And yet, this was exactly the situation I faced when I removed the old fixture.

Time to do my own jury-rigging, involving a blank light-fixture cover routed out and attached to a piece of conduit, in turn attached to the nice light fixture which had to get holes drilled into it to complete the circuit. While significantly better, it did involve more than half a day's labor to get something that, in the end, is not quite right. Someday, we will be the HPOs. It's just a fact we have to accept.

Still, I do like having painted, and such is the situation now.

The Result After Days of Torment