Can you guess what I've been up to recently?
Yes, yes, yes. Besides that.
Oh, come on. I don't even own one of those.
Seriously.
I've been shepherding our mantelpiece towards completion.
I know. I'll wait a bit for you to find that last shred of shock left over from when you learned that Pat Robertson's sissy birth name is "Marion".
In actual hours, it hasn't taken all that long to get to where I am now. It's always that those few hours are strewn like road salt across the quiet back roads of a bustling family life.
I'm sure that the church choir thinks I've dropped out or that I don't like them any more. Frankly, I'm too busy to care much about what they think. I miss singing, but I can't hang a Christmas stocking from it.
So I've taken $65 worth of materials and a bazillion dollars worth of tools and I have beautiful pieces of mantelpiece in the garage.
Now I'm working to push this project over the last, towering, dispiriting hump: painting.
Rarely do I find painting anything to be rewarding. I do find it a bit annoying that after the materials and the hojillion bucks of tools, it all comes down to a $20 gallon of paint and an $8 brush.
The dispiriting part of painting derives from its placement in the project timeline. You work like a dog (granted a very smart, talking, writing, tool-wielding dog) to plan and construct and craft. After hours and hours of exacting work, the form of whatever you're building is complete, like a neoclassical marble sculpture. But like the marble, your naked work is a sham. The damned Romans and Greeks painted their damned sculptures.
So now you get to do tons of niggly work. Filling in all the holes and dents and scratches. Sanding down your patches and any surface that might not have enough tooth for the paint to grab on to. Masking everything you don't want painted. If I could cut-in nearly half as well as my dad can, I'd have less masking to do. In the meantime, the green and blue masking tapes are my friends. By the way, don't bother with cheap masking tape. It's utter crap. First, it doesn't adhere nearly as well as the expensive 3M stuff, so it lifts off and lets paint infiltrate. Secondly, if you leave it in place longer than you've planned (and, as we all know, all projects go exactly as planned), then it adheres permanently, leaving a sticky crust on everything. I have nothing but good things to say about the colorful 3M tape, besides maybe the premium price.
I've got one more coat of paint to go. My wonderful wife helped me break through a bout of experiential myopia (a condition characterized by knowing so clearly the right way to do something that it's impossible for you to recognize the best or easiest way to do it). Most of the high-quality paintbrushes that I own are small and intended for trim work, not the broad top of our mantelpiece. It's difficult to get good coverage with a too-small brush even for the best of painters and if a painter were that accomplished, they'd just use a bigger brush. I announced that I needed to go to Home Depot to buy a larger brush. This gave my wife a chance to have some input. I've found this to be a technique that often contributes to the success of a project and always contributes to the success of our marriage. She knit her brow for a second and then asked "Can you use a roller?"
Instead of a new brush, I've got a nice, uniform coat of paint on the mantelpiece top. Once it dries, I'll roll on a final coat. When that's dry, I'll install the damned thing over our fireplace.
And then we'll hang up our stockings just in time for Santa. For our son, who just this year was able to sit on Santa's lap without screaming bloody murder, I'm hoping Santa's visit is as magical and disturbing as it was to me when I was little.
Pakeha