Home Depot is the Mother Ship
I've come to the conclusion that Home Depot is the Mother Ship. I'm drawn there at least once a week, and it's very much against my will. Not that I don't enjoy the Home Depot experience. But I am poor. I cannot afford to continue being drawn in by the Depot's vacuous force.

I made a sincere effort not to go there this weekend. I made definite plans not to go to Home Depot. In fact, on Saturday while out doing other errands, I gleefully drove past Home Depot, making a note that I was indeed passing Home Depot, instead of going directly to it. It felt good. It was a personal success.

Then I got involved in the Never-ending Bathrooom Painting Project From Hell, and alas, I inevitably had to go to Home Depot to consult someone who could rescue me from my bathroom. After 14 or so hours of work that was not turning out the way it should look, and incidentally 14 hours more than I ever want to spend in a bathroom without anything constructive going on in there, I had no choice but to report to the Mother Ship for help. Beam me over.

My hall bathroom is/was covered in a festively flowery/tulip-ish wallpaper. At the top edge of the paper, around the entire bathroom, was a different flower patterned border. So to enter this bathroom, it looks like someone came in and vomited flowers everywhere. It's too much.

There is also a nice yellow and white 60's style tile around the tub area, which I like. This is the good part of the bathroom. Very charming and cute. So my thought was to replace the flower over-abundance with a solid blue color to accent the nice yellow, by whatever means was the easiest and best way to accomplish this task. Either removing the wallpaper or painting over it. It looks great in my head. So I consulted Home Depot several weeks ago to get the scoop on what to do.

Home Depot told me it was absolutely the better idea to leave the paper as is, and simply paint over it. No problem. To start to tear down wallpaper, they said, would be an on-going disastrously monstrous task. Better to leave it there, and paint over it.

Home Depot set me up with an oil-based primer, which had to go on first, two coats. Then they hooked me up with a semi-gloss paint that should go on nicely on top of the two coats of primer. Easy enough. It should look as great as it does in my head.

Ha!

First of all, this is not my first painting project. I have already successfully painted several rooms of my house, and did quite a nice job, if I do say so myself. I'm very meticulous, very detailed, and very thorough. I know how to paint. So the problem with this bathroom is not my lack of painting expertise. It's just a hellacious bathroom frought with issues.

I began last week with the primer, since it has to dry thoroughly between each coat. It's not a large bathroom, so I figured it wouldn't take long to get a coat of primer up on the walls. The first thing I did before primer-ing was to trim the edges of the flowery border where it was coming up from the wall. The border does not have a straight edge. It seems to be attempting to look like actual flowers coming down from the ceiling, so it is an un-even edge that was not glued down very well. Once I had removed all of the superfluous edges, I was ready to prime.

This is when I discovered that I hate primer. Have you ever worked with this stuff? It is surely a substance sent directly to mankind from the depths of hell. It's horrid, awful stuff. It's fumey beyond belief, so it's nearly impossible to spend any length of time with it without getting a wee bit woozy, especially in an enclosed space such as my bathroom. I opened a window, turned on the vent, and brought in a fan to ease the aroma. But I actually only succeeded in creating a nice wind tunnel in which to challenge myself to work as well as I could in a non-breezy environment.

I stirred the primer until I thought my arm would fall off, hoping it would thicken up a bit. But it never did. Primer is runny, and that makes it tough to work with. Picture painting a wall with slightly thicker milk. It's hard to get it in the right place without much dripping and running of the foul substance.

I began getting the stuff on the wall, but had to stop after almost every brush stroke to wipe up drips. Even with all the tarps and plastic down on the floor and covering every surface possible, the primer was still managing to find escape routes to my tile floor, along with affixing itself to the tiled part of the wall and everywhere else I absolutely did not want it to be. It took several hours to complete the whole bathroom with just the first coat of primer, after which I realized I get to do it all again the next day for coat number two. Hooray.

I also discovered that primer does not like to come off of, well, me. I was almost as thoroughly primer-ed as the wall. With every stroke of the brush, as much primer that goes where it is supposed to go, the same amount flings off the brush out into the room, some landing on me and some landing all over the place. Even as gently as I moved my wrist in an attempt to gently place the primer on the wall, I still managed to cover myself with a nice layer of primer. After the second coat of primer, both the wall and I were ready for the actual painting to begin.

Now, if you've never painted a wall that doesn't have texture, like most walls of your house, it is a whole new ballgame to paint a wall with no texture. The primer provides some texture, but basically you see every stroke of the brush on the wall when you start with the color. There are no bumps or anything there at all to mask the brush strokes. Plus, you have to coat the paint pretty thickly to get it to cover adequately. But since there is no texture to hold the paint on the wall, anything more than a thin layer of paint will inevitably run or drip, usually after you've smoothed one area and gone on to the next area. I soon began to realize this was a losing battle with the paint. As soon as I would get one area finished, I would notice that I'd missed a drip or the paint was beginning to run. Anything I didn't catch quickly dried into a nice drip. It wasn't looking as good as that picture in my head.

On top of the drippy issue, the edge of the flowery border was still very apparent through the two coats of primer and the one coat of paint. The primer was supposed to have smoothed out the ridge of the edge, making it one smooth flat surface. But no, there it was forcing it's way through as though it just did not want to blend in and be one with the rest of the wall. The whole mess was unfortunately looking like I had painted over wallpaper, and my goal was to make it look less like painting over wallpaper and more like just a painted wall. What to do?

I stopped painting the trim of the room and called my mom. She had been the one to actually go to Home Depot the first time and get the primer, paint, and instructions for the bathroom. I wanted to make sure I had done everything right, not missing some major step or some small thing that was singlehandedly destroying my bathroom. And I also wanted to report that the 14 or so hours I'd spent in there already were not proving to create the world's most beautiful bathroom, as is the picture in my head.

My mom said I'd done everything as she had told me, and she couldn't understand why it wasn't working the way Home Depot said it would. We determined I should pack it up for the night and head to Home Depot in the morning to figure out what to do. At this point I had a partially painted bathroom, in total dissaray, and quite a bit of frustration and disappointment that this project wasn't turning out very well. I couldn't very well leave it as is or change my mind about doing the project at this point, so I had no choice but to be sucked into Home Depot again in the morning.

I got up the next day and dragged myself to Home Depot. Now, I could go nuts in there and buy lots of fun things. I remember when I was younger and my dad made me go to Home Depot with him, it was a tortuous experience. I hated Home Depot. Now, I love the Depot. I'm very into home improvement projects. It's a fun place to to be in tune with my inner tool girl. But on this day I did not want to go back because I've pretty much exhausted my budget for home improvement these days, and I did not want to have to spend more money on stuff to fix this bathroom project. It was an unexpected expense.

I went to the paint department and found a helper and began to explain the problem, telling him everything I'd already done and making sure he knew that what I'd already done is what Home Depot had told me to do in the first place. His first idea was more primer. Wha-huh? I'd already primer-ed twice, and I hated it with all of my being. How much more primed does a wall need to be? I'd banished the can of primer to the garage, swearing it would never return to the house again. Now I had to do more of this hated task? Surely there was another answer.

The helper said I should have used a primer with some tint to it, to help the colored paint grab onto the wall better without showing the white of the white primer through the brush strokes. Okay. Home Depot never told me that before.

Then he took me over to the brush selection and said I needed to use a better brush with finer and more bristles, to hide the stroke better. Okay. No one told me that, either. He also said I needed to use a better roller for the main wall, one that is thicker than the cheap ones. Okay. Sure that makes sense.

I then asked him what to do about the border edge showing through the paint. He said I should use some drywall mud and smooth over the edge. Wha-huh? Okay, now we're getting into, like, construction worker terms. I just want to paint the bathroom! No one said anything about spackling stuff.

He showed me the drywall mud, plus the accessories to go with it. Apparently I needed a mud knife and a mud pan, too. Okay, should I just go ahead and sign over my paycheck to Home Depot now? Goodness, this simple project was getting expensive and tedious.

The drywall mud goes on not once, but twice. One layer to fill in, and the next layer to smooth it out. Of course, you need at least eight hours of drying time in between each layer. And once the final layer is dry, you have to sand it to smooth the edges. Oh, and then you have to primer that to get it ready for the paint.

Curse primer. . .

Okay, so that now that I've added an additional 108 steps to my project, the helper person mentioned that I should also use a heavier paint than the glossy stuff I have. It needs to be a flat paint, which will also function as a primer, in the event I want to come back later and add a glossy finish layer on top.

The helper person showed me how to get the drywall mud on the wall, showed me the best ways to use the paintbrush and the roller for the best strokes, and then went into the history and composite make-up of all the different kinds of paints and why, where and how each should be used. He was choc-full of information.

So after this emergency trip to the Mother Ship Home Depot, I came home with drywall mud, a mud knife, mud pan, new (expensive) paint brush, new (expensive) roller brush, lots of instructions to add to my home improvement portfolio, and a whole new can of paint, incidentally in a slightly different shade of blue. I'd decided during all of this that I didn't love the color I already had. So since I was re-doing most of it anyway, why not change the color? Sheesh.

I've now spackled the drywall mud onto the wall, two coats, and will be sanding that this evening. This simple project has turned into at least a week-long, probably longer, project.

But when it's all over and done with it will surely be the most beautiful bathroom in the world. And I will be moonlighting as a drywall mudder to pay for it.

C.T.