Over the past few days we’ve been working along side Kevin’s sister to paint the interiors of our house. In the process, I often found myself thinking about the size of our house: it’s really not that small after all. We’ve known that for a while, but after spending hours coating the tall ceilings and taking care at the wood to drywall edges, the extent of our house is much more obvious. (Even with 4-5 coats on every wall it was much quicker for me to paint my similarly sized townhouse.)
We started with a stinky vapour barrier primer (hello respirator, my old friend) and then moved on to fancy ultra-low VOC paint. We had wanted to use all YOLO Colorhouse paint but the store was so low on stock we could only use it for the ceiling. The store made colour matches to Mythic paints for the rest. It’s interesting to me that while all the ultra low/no- VOC paints I’ve used have similar smells, each one is still unique. The YOLO paint had a sweetness to it while the Mythic paint seemed to smell more plastic-like and seemed to get me sneezing. That and I was making silly little mistakes and getting grumpy, so clearly it’s not the best paint for me to work with.
Thankfully there was other work to be done too so yesterday afternoon I switched gears to cleaning the floor in preparation for our washer and dryer to be installed. Going to the laundromat or taking hand wash wools to the parents hasn’t been that bad, but after 45 and a half months, I’m really looking forward to being able to wash everything at home. (I’m surprised to find myself excited about the dishwasher too, but that may be because I did 7 loads of hand washing yesterday.)
Now for that concrete. Right near the start of our build we opted for dyed concrete. We had it poured right at the beginning but in recent months it’s been assaulted with regular dirt and grime from outside plus drywall mud, plumbing glues and now paint. Mopping away the drywall mud wasn’t too hard but I still spent more than an hour on my hands and knees scrubbing and that little bathroom is just a tiny slice of our main floor. I can see I’m going to be putting some long days in before we officially move in.
All of this has me thinking – thank goodness our house isn’t any bigger! At nearly 1200 sf it’s going to be huge compared to the 500 sf we’ve been calling home for nearly 4 years. I think we’ll get used to it though. On Friday night when all our work was done we had a little fun “practising” how it will feel to relax in our new home:
Slightly Snug House 