Painting A Room

I decided to paint a room last week. Helene was not pleased to hear me say this. According to her I’m a messy painter. The last room I painted was the kitchen of an old farm house we used to live in in Uxbridge, Ontario. When we sold it we advertised it as “recently renovated. Everything has a new coat of paint, even the dishes.”

The room I wanted to paint this time around is in the basement. It’s my “writing room”. It used to be the “music room” - the place where Madison’s drums were - but I swapped them out so I could have a place to write in undisturbed. It's soundproofed. For a writer, it's perfect.

The desk in my new writing room is big - too big to take out of the room whole - and I didn’t want to take it apart and carry it out in pieces because I just took it in there in pieces and put it together. The room is long and narrow. I’m not. As you’ll see, this would prove to be a problem.

I wiggled the desk as far away from the wall as I could, a distance of maybe six or seven inches. That’s how much room I was going to be allowed to manoeuvre in and it became obvious to me that painting the walls in that room was going to require patience and skill - both of which, when it comes to painting, I discovered I have precious little of. I would also have to hold my belly in lots. Ideally, painting this room requires a much thinner person.

But I figured what the heck. How hard could it be? “I’ll just suck my belly in and move the roller up and down,” I told myself. “Start after lunch, finish by supper.”

But it didn’t exactly turn out that way. That first afternoon all I did was buy the paint and patch up the holes on the wall with some putty. There were lots of holes because Madison had hung rock star posters all over the place and they took strips of the wall with them when I peeled them down.

So that was Day One.

On Day Two I sanded the patched areas. Then, just as I was about to start painting over them, Helene stuck her head in the room and said, “Aren’t you gonna prime it first?”

“Aren’t I gonna what?”

“You have to prime it first,” Helene said. “With primer. If you don’t, the patched spots are gonna show through like shiny scars.”

I looked at her. “Of course I’m gonna prime it,” I said. “What do you think I am? Stupid?” So off to the hardware store I went - I told Helene I was going to get a coffee at Tim Horton’s - and bought a small can of primer which I took home, smuggled inside the house and rolled over the patched areas on the wall. The rest of Day Two was spent watching primer dry and drinking Tim Horton's coffee.

On Day Three I actually started painting the walls. It occurred to me that, because of the narrowness of the room, it was going to be a challenge not to get paint all over the clothes I was wearing. So I stripped down to nothing (there’s no windows in the room, so I wasn’t worried about being seen painting in the buff like that) and squeezed in behind my desk and started rolling paint onto the wall. And I guess it’s a good thing I disrobed because I soon discovered that the paint I was using - it’s called Moonlight Drive Blue - shows up prominently on my whiter-than-canvas body. Every time I turned around I inadvertently painted a different part of my anatomy. Once, in a particularly tight corner, I took too deep a breath and my belly, filling with paint-scented air, flattened against the freshly painted surface of the wall in front of me. The resulting bright blue circle on my midsection was perfectly round.

My belly button, right in the middle, looked like a winking eye with every breath.

Right about then I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. I looked like one of those abstract painters who use themselves as paint brushes and fling themselves at their canvasses. I had paint on both butt cheeks, on my elbows, knees, nose, and feet - you name it. There was even paint in my armpits.

About the only thing that wasn’t completely covered in paint was the wall.

Eventually, after two more days, the room got painted. I tell everybody the blue flecks on the grey carpet were put there purposely to bring out the color of the wall.