While Brandon's Away, Barb Will Paint!

Brandon was able to make a trip back to Washington to celebrate his mom's birthday. With Barb home alone for the weekend, she decided to surprise Brandon by getting some "big" things done.

She decided that, once again, the most logical thing to do was to paint something. The only spaces still in need of a fresh coat were the upstairs hallway/stairway and the laundry closet. Of course, to accomplish either, she'd need to move major appliances alone and/or find, move, set up, and climb the ladder to reach the tops of the walls in the stairway. Either would be a challenge. Both sounded like the perfect plan!

Of course, the upstairs hallway wasn't even prepped for paint yet. Remember that project where we widened the doorway downstairs? Remember how we had to move the pipes leading to the upstairs bathroom? Remember how we had to cut a big hole in the wall upstairs to access those pipes? Well, so far we'd only installed drywall and taped the seam. We had put one coat of mud atop the tape, but it hadn't been a thick enough coat, as we could still see the tape through it. So, in preparation for Barb's Weekend Challenge, she secretly spent some time every day after school the prior week re-mudding and sanding the patched wall. Looks like new!

So, once Barb dropped Brandon off at the airport, everything was ready to be primed. One thing, however still stood in her way: the laundry closet was still full of, well, laundry. Not only did the washer and dryer need to move, but she also had to remove the shelves (and all their contents). So, first she dragged the dryer to the center of the dining room and (not wanting to mess with water lines) shimmied the washer to the center of the closet. With some brute strength she was able to lift out the shelves and lie them in the middle of the living room. Brandon wasn't gone for two hours and already the house looked like a war zone. Now just a quick coat of primer and everything would be ready. Not bad for a Thursday night!

Hoping to get two coats of paint in each space AND to have enough time to put everything back in place before Brandon returned Sunday afternoon, Barb got right to work when she got home from school on Friday. First, everything upstairs had to be taped off.

Now, painting itself is relatively easy, especially since Barb's already painted most surfaces in this house. Painting a stairwell, however, requires a little more effort. The funny thing about stairways is that they keep going up. And those walls get pretty tall. So, before she could paint, Barb had to figure out how in the world she was going to reach that high. Obviously, she'd need the ladder, but the question was how to finagle it on the stairs. After about a half an hour, this is what she came up with:

Thank goodness for Brandon's super nifty foldable, multi-height, amazing ladder! Now all that remained was some very careful balance and a couple gallons of paint (not to mention a weekend's worth of man hours) and voila! Painted spaces!

(Sorry, these pictures were taken at night....the paint's not that dark, we promise!)

 When Brandon got home, he was dumbfounded at the work his amazing wife accomplished while he was gone. Barb's just hoping that doesn't mean he'll keep finding reasons to leave for the weekend.... ;)