The Aerie
Well, this is the shortest week of the year: one day between the-Sunday-before-the-Fourth-of-July, and the-Fourth-of-July. I'm at work, which today is a particular waste of time. My boss is browsing the web, which I can tell because she's sending to our group links to web pages which I have previously sent to her, and which she then bookmarked and forgot until she went through them today.
The wife and I made our list of things-to-do before the Big Trip (not to be mistaken with the the Big Trip of 2000 - this trip is twice as long and three times as far) which cast me into a state of anxiety. I addressed the anxiety by making myself do some of the biggest jobs. Yesterday's candidate was Repainting the Bathroom Shower.
The bathroom shower was in bad shape due to mold and mildew, both resulting from the weird architecture of the shower. That is, for some reason a partition wall desceneds about 18 inches down from the ceiling above the shower doors, leaving only about a 10-inch gap for steamy shower air to exit. Maybe that's deliberate, maybe there's some reason to keep it from spreading across the whole ceiling (like, maybe, a whole ceiling full of mildew). In any event the trouble has been literally growing for a while now, but I wanted to hold off dealing with it until the new bathroom was in.
But the new bathroom is working, and I was fraught with anxiety over the gigantic to-do list for this month, so yesterday I took bleach and sandpaper and paintbrush in hand, stood the stepladder upon the uncertain surface of the bathtub, and attacked.
I climbed the ladder and scrubbed off the mildew with a too-strong mixture of bleach and water, grateful several times that I was wearing glasses (but too lazy to go get my goggles). I rinsed the walls with the removable showerhead and dried them down with a towel, allowing them to air-dry a bit as well.
While it was drying I decided to see how effective bleachwater was on getting out the soapscum on the bottom of the shower. Despite my having nearly killed myself scrubbing it not too long ago, it was once again gray with sticky soapscum. Interestingly the bleachwater seemed to work and before attacking the ceiling again I scrubbed out the tub so that it too was nice and white. That was a chore I was going to pay my kids to do, so a bit of money saved.
Then I got out the sandpaper and sanded out the worst of the stains, as well as the loose paint. Some of it didn't give way, so I got out the scraper and was soon covered in five-year-old peelings of anti-mildew paint. A little more sanding and everything was ready for the first coat.
First I decided to save myself some cleanup trouble by laying the classifieds over the tub's surfaces. Then I got up with the paintbrush and put down the first coat. It didn't take too long, but in that enclosed space my brain started to get a little mildew-resistanty with fumes. It was 5:00 and the can suggested waiting two hours for the second coat, so as the rest of the family headed off to a movie, I climbed down and sat on the couch to rest.
Two hours later I snapped awake. The house was silent, it was 7:00 on the nose. I climbed back up on the stepstool and as I dipped the brush into the can for the second coat, the family arrived home from the movie - for me it was as if the intervening two hours never happened.
I finished the second coat and started cleaning up the newspapers when I discovered a tiny miscalculation. While the classifieds had kept a little bit of paint off the tub's interior, the tub had been damp: the classifieds were now imprinted on the tub in reverse. Another ten minutes of scrubbing ensued.
Finally I got the room cleaned up, except for rebuilding the shower doors. Getting those scrubbed clean is yet another item on my endless to-do list, so I've left those out for another day... We can't use the shower till Wednesday anyway...
Posted by Albatross at July 3, 2006 3:14 PM | TrackBack