It is coming around to that time of year - well, maybe more than one year - when minds turn not-so-idly to thoughts of redecorating. Winter is perhaps the best time to do any work on the home, since it is cool and breezy and going without the fan or air-conditioning is still fairly comfortable. This is when there is a great deal of hammering and scraping going on in almost any apartment block, with painting, tiling, polishing carpentry and other jobs in progress what seems like all day and night long. The people downstairs become enemies, as the people upstairs start a feud with the people above them, who have a war going on with the people next door to them…ad infinitum.
We are in just this situation right now. When we had a little of our house ‘done’ – a new linen closet that extended into a window and what was, in effect, a new wall replacing the old that was water damaged and nicely polished floors over which father, kitten, maid and myself slide as we try and move from one end of the house to the other – we were self-conscious to a fault about how much noise we were making as furniture was pulled around, doors were slammed and machines whirred furiously. But our work had a finite start and finish, and the clean up was as fast and furious. There was little debris left outside the house and, though we are still trying to get rid of the swathes of white cement left behind by the final ‘finisher’ of the marble polishing process, nothing of the activity is visible in the lobby, the landing or the stairwell. I cannot say that of the people downstairs, who have been littering our wing of the building for weeks now, making the most unholy din through the day and late into the night – until threatened with legal action – and generally being uncouth and disorderly about the entire proceedings.
In all this, we have decided to get our own tiny form of revenge by starting work on our apartment just when the unmannerly people downstairs have finished with theirs. Which means that we will begin painting our home shortly, make a satisfactory amount of noise doing so and disturb the folks who have made our lives fairly unhappy for a while now. This is not a deliberate decision that we are taking, even though my father and I do grin wickedly and make evil jokes about how to make it even more difficult for our vertical neighbours to rest in the peace that they are used to from us. It just so happens that the timing is more or less perfect for our nefarious intentions.
But getting a home painted is not as easy as it sounds to be. First, we have to decide on when. While we are ready almost overnight – I said “ALMOST” – the painter has to visit and figure out what needs to be done and how soon it can be done – which takes another few weeks to schedule. The entire house cannot be given over, however tempting it may seem, and we cannot possibly, in all practical reality, move into a hotel for the two or so weeks it will take. Once that is done, the colours need to be chosen. This time, I thought I would look at textures or colours that would bring more light and sunshine into our home and so our lives. So I looked for gold, rough-surface veneers and the like, but was offered designs that ranged from wildly aquatic swirls to pastoral scenes to Spiderman swinging over Gotham City with Batman in hot pursuit.
Shudder.
We are now planning to stick with plain white or off-white. And we hope to get it started as soon as the people downstairs move back into their flat.
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