There will be no Fashion Friday today because I am holding on to my sanity by a very loose thread, my friends.
This is the reason.
That’s the inside of the cabinet in Caroline’s bathroom.
By all appearances it would seem that a family of rabid possums got in there and had themselves a keg party.
I only wish that were true.
I did that. On purpose.
Apparently yesterday morning something inside my head just snapped and I decided it was time to clean out the bathroom cabinet that has been on my To Do List for the last five years.
Because mountains of laundry and a desperate need for groceries just seemed too easy to accomplish.
I need a challenge. Where is my Everest?
We renovated our house in 2003. It was an extensive redo which required us to pack all our stuff and move completely out of the house. I was also pregnant at that time so, as you can imagine, SHEER JOY TO LIVE WITH.
I actually balanced my eight month pregnant body on scaffolding to help hang crown-molding because there was no way I was bringing my PRECIOUS BABY home to a rent house.
Like Caroline would have shown up, looked around and said, “Wow. What a dump. I should have stayed in utero.”
Anyway, this bathroom cabinet desperately needed a serious overhaul. From the outside it looked fine, but on the inside it was cracked, peeling paint and covered in something that I hesitate to call shelf paper for fear of offending real shelf paper everywhere. So in the midst of the remodel, we told the painters to make sure they painted the bathroom cabinet.
The only problem was that their grasp of the English language was questionable and every time we told them to paint the bathroom cabinet, they painted the OUTSIDE of the bathroom cabinet. That sucker has about twelve coats of a nice, white eggshell finish.
By the time we realized what had happened, it was too late. We moved back in the almost finished house and Caroline showed up just two weeks later.
And by the way, when we carried her in the newly renovated house in her infant carrier, she totally gave us the thumbs up on the nice digs.
The interior of the bathroom cabinet has been an albatross around my neck for the last five years. In fact, it was on my list of things to get done once Caroline started preschool, but somehow all those trips to Target got in the way.
Yesterday morning I decided that since Caroline has now graduated from preschool, it was time to get it done.
Bless my heart.
I headed in there with my Hefty kitchen trash bag which was the equivalent of trying to harness the wind in a mayonnaise jar. I pulled off shelf paper, chipped off paint, and tore through some unknown substance that crumbled as I touched it. The cabinet is so big and tall that I actually had to climb in it to reach the top. I had no idea what I might find.
Behind the shelf paper that lined the walls was some sort of material reminiscent of a burlap sack and it was nailed to the wall. I started ripping it out and just knew something disgusting was going to fall on me.
About that time, Caroline came into the bathroom and turned on the sink. When I heard the hissing sound of water, I leapt out of the bathroom cabinet because I was certain I had just disturbed a family of snakes that had been residing there since the late 60’s.
I am not kidding.
FEAR. PANIC. HYPERVENTILATING.
I may have overreacted.
I definitely didn’t know I had the ability to leap from inside the bathroom cabinet to the top of the bathroom counter in a single bound.
Anyway, I finally got it stripped down to just the wood. SIX HOURS LATER.
Caroline and I went to the hardware store and purchased a gallon of paint in a lovely shade of bright pink. Because who doesn’t want a bright pink cabinet interior? We also bought some primer and other paraphernalia to complete our project.
And my hat is off to the helpful paint salesmen who were much more concerned about searching for the Logan’s Roadhouse website so they could see what their T-Bone steaks looked like. Clearly, that was so much more interesting and crucial to the job than some customer who wanted to paint a cabinet bright pink.
This is how far I’d gotten by the end of the day.
Actually that’s inaccurate. I did get the first coat of primer on but I’m too tired to walk the ten feet it would take me to get in there and take a picture.
Just imagine a really bad white paint job.
Today I’ll start on the bright pink interior.
I hope to have it finished before Caroline leaves for college, but I don’t want to push myself too hard.
I’ll let y’all know how it goes.