The ticking clock

I think it’s starting to settle in how little time we have before Seattle. Especially considering we still have to do the final round of packing, move, clean and fix up the old apartment, and hopefully get the new place in some semblance of order- all before next Friday. I get stuck a lot trying to decide the next course of action- should we move in immediately, should we get as much trim stripping done as possible first, should we shift our focus in getting the kitchen & bathroom cleaned up so that we can actually live there? To add to it all, we need to get Clint’s studio up and running concurrently since he’s losing his darkroom [read: closet] and washout booth [tub] with the apartment. On the upside, he won’t be rinsing the ink out of his screens in the tub, which means the shower curtain liner won’t be tainted with the mixture of all the ink colors, which conveniently makes it look like we are utterly disgusting to visitors. It took Billy at least a year to figure out we weren’t bathing in a tub full of filth (I’m not sure what that says about his opinion of us in that he never questioned it).

We’ve almost got one full wall of trim done, we stepped back at the end of the night last night and looked at it- in our humble opinion it’s going to look amazing. Funny thing is- it’s going to look so natural, like it was that way all along, so I’m glad we’ll at least have photographic evidence of the transformation. I think our strategy should switch- before we were thinking we didn’t want anyone in here until we’re finished, now we realized it should be just the opposite. We should have everyone over just so they can see the before, to truly appreciate the after. I will say on the learning curve, there have been a few magical tricks that once discovered make the entire process so much easier. Heat gun was the first. Pulling the 1/8” layers of paint off in one go made me lightheaded with joy. The second, more subtle trick I’ve found is the denatured alcohol to get off what I am calling shellac, but whatever it is it turns into a gooey brown mess once stripper goes on. I still haven’t perfected the denatured alcohol, but I’ve at least narrowed it down to realize it requires steel wool, paper towels, a scraper, and perhaps a spray bottle, I just have to figure out the order. My final discovery has been the beloved dremel. I’ve used the dremel in projects past but have apparently since forgotten the magic of the little rotary tool. Using the steel brush attachment it cuts through paint in areas where multiple layers of stripper have just mocked me. We’re off to get a corded dremel soon, although I’m slightly worried that once we have that, I’ll get tunnel vision and forget all about the packing, moving and painting that needs done. Although I understand it correctly, Billy and Clint are going to take care of all that while I’m at Lemongrass tonight.