Weekend Wuss pt.2



Day 2

Day 2, Diana has finished the painting of the walls and the wood work and is waiting for the calvary to bring the saw and cut her fake bead board and edging to size so she can paint it and get them up on the walls. Late in the day Broskey and Alphagal arrive to help get the project jump started.

“Before they got here I moved the sheet of fake bead board from my bedroom to the kitchen. I tried to get it down the basement stairs but its too big. Its really, a two person job.”

after Broskey and Alphagal arrive, Alphagal and Diana heft the enormous sheet of fake bead board down the stairs while Broskey gets the supplies out of the truck

“I don’t actually have saw horses to properly do this. I pulled this short bench out and brought down my plastic recycling boxes. That’s good enough for balancing this sheet and cutting exacting dimensions? Right? Okay! This will turn out great. Will I have enough? of course I figured it from the idea while the sheet is measured from its vertical height and the wall is horizontal! And my 50 year old house? The walls are all perfectly plum and totally straight. They really build houses back then - Post War, in a huge hurry, one after another after another as quickly as possible... Okay, the walls make the Queer Eye guys look like young republicans. Check your expectations of easy measurements at the crooked door!”

After much work and piles of saw dust everything is cut, measured and numbered.

“ I’m going to paint them tonight and hang them tomorrow, lalala. This will be fun!”

“Ready to paint” my ass.
“Is red paint always a bitch?”
“This shitty fake bead board is nothing like real wall”
“Why won’t this cover?”

“How many coats is this going to take?”

“Well, it looks like I hosted the St. Valentines day massacre in here, but they are all done.”

It takes about 12 coats to get the job done... and with that Diana calls it a day.

Day Three


“They all looked so pretty all lined up against the wall! My paint job was awesome! They look great down here in the basement. I’m glad I got that job all finished last night.”

Diana finds her tube of liquid nails and takes it upstairs to read the directions

“Cut one quarter inch off top of container top. Okay. clip Done. Okay. Why won’t this stuff come out? Oh, “take wire or nail and puncture interior bag”. Okay. perforate Now. Why won’t it come out? “Fit tube into calking gun”. What? I don’t have a calk gun! Why didn’t the guy at Lowes mention a calk gun when we were in the store? Does he think I carry calking guns around in my purse? Shit.

An unexpected trip to the hardware store. Afterwards, armed with her calk gun, Diana starts again

“Why can’t I get this in? Is there a door or something? Why are there two trigger things? I JUST WANT THIS DONE AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH! DAD!”

Diana calls her Dad and he tells her how to make the calk gun work. She is still confused and by the end of the conversation she can’t here his instructions over her blood pounding in her ears. Has Diana bitten off more then she can chew with this project?”

“Okay. It’s in the gun thingy and I didn’t kill anyone”

Putting the fake bead board on the wall goes quickly


“Getting them on the wall was messy. How do I get all this crap off my hands? the fake bead board pieces I painted last night looked great downstairs. It looks really uneven and patchy up here. Great. I just washed all those brushes and put the paint up.”

After another phone call to her father to get directions on getting the liquid nail tube out of the calking gun, Diana spends the rest of the day touching up the paint and cursing

Well. The projects not done yet. The edging needs to be cut and primered and painted and I have to get some kind of fill in pieces to make up for the walls being crooked... but it looks all right . Kind of. In a “Boy I can tell Diana did this” kind of way. I ended up going over budget because of the whole calk gun thing, but if I had paid someone to do it, it would have cost a lot more then $43. I saved being made to feel lame because I was too useless to do the piddley little job myself.