I am so not good at painting!

Synchronized cats

I missed yesterday’s blog because I was painting and things just got away from me. Cate is in Moscow and I lost track of time.

There are many things at which I am not good – and there are things at which I am particularly bad.

One of these is painting. I try to avoid it but in an apartment that is entirely white the walls do get marked so I try to – every now and again – do a spot of painting just to keep it looking good. Marks get on the walls for all sorts of reasons. There are numerous cats who live here and they knock things over – well one of them does.

Cate has a candle fetish and it often looks like Stephansdom on All Saints Day in here – and these leave black marks on the walls. The furniture gets moved around and there is just the wear and tear of life – you know how it is.

So I like to occasionally take a pot of paint and a small roller and dab at marks on the walls to cover them up as best I can – which is none too good. Well – I had not done this for a while and there were quite a few marks and scruffy bits that needed sorting out so I set out with a pot of paint and roller and spent a good two hours pottering around the lounge room.

After half an hour or so I look at the trail I had left behind me and thought that the it looked a bit conspicuous – I had a left a bright white trail behind me and had a horrible fright for a moment – thinking I was using gloss paint. But I checked and it was definitely matt paint. So I thought well it will be OK when it dries – it always has been in the past.

But it wasn’t.

Now there are thousands of different whites and this was not the same white I had used in the past – because I could not get that – but it was just plain old wall white for goodness sake – but it got no duller as it dried. It was terrifying and could not be viewed with the naked eye for fear of snow blindness.

So I hurtled off to Bauhaus and got another tub of flat matt white and this time used a larger roller – thinking that this may have been the problem.

This time the paint was not quite as conspicuous but it had left clear roller marks all over the walls and is quite clearly a vastly different white from the existing wall color.

So I did it again with another paint and a bigger roller and it was worse.

So it has turned into on of those goat things. I cannot paint all the walls in the lounge room because they are gigantic – and eight meters high. I have had to create discrete areas and cordon them off cunningly with masking tape so that the joins of different white hues are not so noticeable. If people do notice I will tell them it is art and part of a static installation I am creating.

So yesterday I had to embark on quite a gigantic painting thing and mark off parts of walls and re-paint them and pray to the Fuckup Fairy that when I woke up today it would not be so bad that they would not need multiple coats.

Well – it’s OK – sort of – if you don’t look too closely.

There is quite a bit more that needs doing but I am on the right track. Of course I am not painting high up the walls  and I am painting around the large pieces of furniture – simple because I cannot move them – with my broken ribs this is impossible – so when we move out this is going to look very strange indeed.

I can imagine the painters coming in and thinking – WTF?

Anyway – Sissi helped as best she could and I kept a damp cloth at hand to get the paint off her paws. But I am so not good at painting. I get more paint on me and the floor and everything else than I do on the walls. It's just tragic. 

Anyway - I am off to do it again.