Mmmm, painty.

You may have thought the end of the Tour de France meant that I’d be able to get back to some semblance of regular posting — but non. Last week was a marathon of scraping, sanding, painting and shellacking, bookended by two boomerangs to the Big Apple so that elder daughter could get her head filled with leadership and Broadway, spend a week in an Ivy League dorm, and enjoy the wonders of being a 15-year-old with no parents around. (Those wonders had better have changed since I enjoyed them, that’s all I’m saying.)

Even with all those days to work on it, the task exceeded the time, so for now she’s still living without things like curtains or doors, and now I’m running out of momentum and wondering why she really needs a door, anyway. I would have hoped that after 17 years in the same house (oh. my. god) I’d be done blaming the previous owners for the conditions of things and would have moved on to blaming myself . . . but honestly, what the hell did they do to these doors? Under the ’70s era latex paint, which lifted up like a bad sunburn, the crazed varnish covers marks that could only have been made by a toddler with a disc sander, and that I’m now left wondering how to get out, ’cause regular sanding is hardly touching them. Oy. But the last bit of painting of the trim got done today, so the dropcloths can come up, the furniture put in some approximation of how it’s going to be, and we can move on to refilling the room with all the junk that is now distributed throughout the rest of the upstairs. Not that I mind having two violins and a bass guitar in my bedroom, but they don’t leave much room for my bicycle or skis.