I need to make a good impression this week while Mrs K's away living it up on the ocean wave, so I eschew the second cup of coffee at breakfast this morning, send the mailing out early, walk the dog and brush my teeth all before noon. Well before noon, in fact.
My target this week is to get half the radiators painted and finish the pantry completely. And make a start on the blue room, too. Perhaps more - there's no harm in having ambitions. Well, unless it's your ambition to become the world's most notoriou'
s serial killer. Or to become an accountant, obviously.
So, pausing only for a light lunch, I get a coat of paint on the radiators in the blue room, the dining room and a first coat on the radiator in the front room. I forget - is it front room or sitting room if you're hopelessly middle class? And toilet. Or is it loo? I can never remember, class traitor that I am.
I still feel guilty that the spray gun works so well, but am soon comforted when it fails spectactularly to do anything even approaching a workmanlike job with the emulsion in the pantry. Which seems counter-intuitive to me and everyone else to whom I mention it - gloss, surely, is thicker than emulsion in a blood/water sort of way, and therefore should be harder to squirt through air jets.
But no. The emulsion needs diluting more than three to one while the gloss needs just a 50/50 mix. I don't understand it, but then the pile of things I don't understand now rivals the EU butter mountain so no real surprise there.
And of course this then means that I'm more or less spraying only very lightly coloured water on the walls. Walls which, in their turn, are made of a mixture of sponge cake, tissue paper and holes for hiding spiders in. Walls whose covering has a primary purpose not of covering the walls but of soaking up all moisture applied to the surface and wicking it away deep into its interior, where it and, most importantly, its colouring will never be seen again.
So after an hour the room looks more or less the same. I, of course, am now a lovely shade of dilute white. The pantry room is about four metres by four and less - much less - than two high, has only one tiny window which I've taped up and a small door. The aim of a paint sprayer is to spray paint into the air, and I get to breathe it all in and my nose is also now full of paint. I did put my earplugs in, since the paint sprayer sounds like a miniature vacuum cleaner. What fun. And, with any luck, these walls will only need about another 438 coats before they stop looking like grey concrete.
The best bit of the day is watching the Time Team Big Dig, on a Channel 4 near you. What a great program, and what a great idea. Although I do regret that, when the team have finished digging a test pit in some people's gardens to see what interesting ancient stuff may lie beneath, the end results are sometimes presented in a rather sub-Antiques Roadshow sort of way - "Do you have any idea how much it's worth?" "Oh, the money doesn't matter it's the sentimental value that counts. Really."
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Posted by: bestiality stories archive at August 7, 2004 04:14 PM