At Least There's No Sonny and Cher

I guess one of my jobs on this blog is to make the movie references, so let me just say that -- in a lot of ways -- home renovation is a lot like the film Groundhogs Day. Not just because Chris Elliot is always hanging around making wisecracks, but also because it seems like no matter how hard we work on a given project in a given day we are rarely that much closer to the goals.

So the last few days have all started with me thinking that it would be the day that I would get the foyer ready for painting once and for all. But between the wallpaper debacle, extra passes at sponging everything down and smoothing out plaster, and the normal Murphy s Law saying that everything will take twice as much time as originally allocated, none actually ended with the foyer ready to paint. In fact, we didn't even take progress pictures after putting in a long day yesterday because posting them would been like those puzzles where you have work really hard to tell the minute differences between two drawings.

But today was different. Yes, we did spend most of the day washing and plastering and masking and remasking our gorgeous woodwork. And that was all we had time to do before dinner, which we knew it was time for when Prairie Home Companion came on our local NPR station. I mean, we like those charming tales of Lake Wobegon as much as anyone, at least as much as Homer Simpson, who while listening to Keillor hit his radio and screamed "Be Funnier!", but still.

But I digress. We did indeed stop working to eat dinner, but then we went back to work. And at that point we were actually able to paint the foyer. Or at least prime it, but I think that counts. It took us under two hours to prime the whole thing -- ceiling and all -- and we finished just in time for Second Dinner. And while I know that in any real sense this wasn't making progress any more than the washing and the plastering, it sure feels better to have the day end with the walls a different color than they started.