So on day 5 of nannygate, at 3:15pm, I started painting that downstairs bathroom I was hiding in. I know Nipper Knapp loves me, but I think this might have pushed him over the edge. How this man who hates all things paint related could be married to a woman, who decides to paint a bathroom in the late afternoon whilst their toddler is mid-meltdown, is beyond me. I am lucky to have him, and I hope that the 15 minutes I made him spend looking for alan wrenches (to take down the mirrors and towel hook) wasn't the hay that hurt the dromedary.
When we got pregnant our doctor gave us two bits of advice:
1. Go out and walk around with nothing in your hands, because you won't do that again for 18 years.
2. Don't remodel, redecorate, paint, plaster, or paper anything while your pregnant.
Right. I heeded the first bit, the second not so much. I was in full blown nesting mania when I was pregnant. We bought this house when I was 7 months along, and the destruction began. The upstairs bathroom had only a shower, which my mother, bless her heart, shattered the day after we closed escrow. She very kindly gifted us with the money to replace the shower with a claw foot tub. It wasn't in our budget to get rid of the wall to wall brown travertine tile, and in some sort of pregnancy induced color blindness, I had my mind set on this bright blue color for the walls because I wanted the bathroom to feel like a "spa". Yeah, nothing says tranquility like ugly tile, and mismatched paint.
Ok, so we rectified that little disaster a few months ago, and painted the whole thing chocolate brown, which makes the ugly tile go away (sort of), and it looks nice with the wall colors of the adjoining rooms.
The house was painted by the previous owner in various shades of hideousness. So poor Nipper Knapp, who, as I mentioned before, hates painting, was kind enough paint every room in the house before Jack was a few months old. Good man. The only room he didn't paint was the stairwell, that required some patching, and a ladder propped up on the stair. I refused to let him get up on the ladder, or as I referred to it "the widow maker" when Jack was an infant, so we hired someone to do it. I'm not usually a nervous nelly, but, pregnancy and new motherhood brought out my most charming attributes. Nothing more appealing than an anxious, hovering, exhausted, o.c.d. woman, with a pantone swatch book, and big dreams.
So when he spied me with a paint brush in hand, this is how it went:
"what are you doing?"
"painting the bathroom"
"which one?"
"the downstairs one. Why on earth would I paint the upstairs bathroom? We just had it done."
"who knows."
Who knows, is right. I have other things to be doing. Building a career, talking to my child, seducing my husband. But for some reason, painting the bathroom in the middle of the day seemed like a good way to make everything right with my world.
Here is the before picture, and, the before before picture. Did I mention I had Nipper swap the sink from the upstairs bathroom, and put it in the downstairs bathroom? We chucked the gigantic cupboard sink that took up 99% of the smallest WC in America.
It's tiny, and is the same orange as the kitchen, and every time I go in there, I feel like I'm in a sadly festive cave. Once I'm done, I'll post more. If the project takes more than a week, and there are no follow up posts, you'll know it's because Nipper has left me, and Jack and I are trying to scrape together some semblance of a normal life, since Daddy went out for smokes, and didn't never come home again...
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