THE SONIC BOOMER
I don’t even want to talk about it.
Let’s just say that sometimes I overdo it, I really do. I had a couple of “free” days (only four deadlines, three loads of laundry, a stack of bills and a new girl to finish training at the store), so I decided it was the perfect opportunity to paint the back room at my antiques mall.
This particular back room is about 500 square feet with walls that are 14 feet high. It has two 8-foot windows back there and seven doors. There’s a set of built-in shelves and a staircase with a landing. And everything I just mentioned is lovingly outlined in 100-year-old trim.
“I’ll do the walls,” my husband quickly volunteered, then ran to the hardware store to buy a $400 industrial-size paint sprayer. It took me several hours to move everything out of his way — all the computers, furniture, shopping carts, hand trucks, worktables, folding chairs, signs, drapes, candles, file folders and paper clips — but I did it.
Mark proudly stuck the sucker part of his new toy into a five-gallon bucket of paint and vit-vit-vit — he was done. Within this same timeframe, I got three stairs painted. It would have been four, but the new girl somehow froze the credit card machine and I had to run up front and figure that out. When I returned, everything in the back room was covered in a fine painty mist, including the air.
Mark was coughing.
I opened the back door and immediately three flies wafted in, securing themselves to surfaces just out of reach and batting their wings frantically.
Over the next day and a half, I managed to get all the trim work done, balancing like an acrobat on the top of a 10-foot ladder one moment, hunching in a corner heaped with 100-year-old dust the next. And repeat. And again.
And… Oh, you get it. It was miserable. But soon I was done, sort of.
All I had left to do were the floors. Upon hearing this, Mark hightailed it out to a bar to watch the Gators game, claiming his work had been completed two days before. But the floors, in addition to being scuffed, scraped and dirty, were also covered in a fine painty mist.
And now I must pause for a moment to praise the effectiveness of a product called Krud Kutter. It really does cut through crud, and all you have to do is pour it on, wait 10 minutes, scrape, rinse and then wax. You do this in 3-foot by 3-foot patches. For my back room, that’s 55 patches. By staggering my work, I completed the whole process in just under six hours. Hurrah for me! I was done!
No, I was not done. I still had to bring back all the computers, furniture, shopping carts, hand trucks, worktables, folding chairs, signs, drapes, candles, file folders and paper clips. Then I was done.
But I don’t want to talk about it.
