Hemming and Hawing

Behind the scenes I've been repainting the inside of several rooms in our home. It's taking me much longer than I expected for many reasons. First I was having a hard time deciding on a paint color. I detest painting but necessity and budget dictate that I do the painting myself. Have you noticed fuel prices have gone up 52 cents a gallon in one month? Gary isn't a very neat painter. More paint would be on the floor than the walls if he painted, so that leaves me as the painter.

Over my lifetime I've painted every home I've lived in, both inside and out, and I'm just plain tired of painting. I think this is the ninth place I've painted and some several times over. When I get finished painting though I think the results are well worth the effort. For example the first photo is what the kitchen dinette area looks like now with a gray shade of paint. The photo just above is what the kitchen looked like with the coral color I painted when we first moved here. We had to paint the kitchen because we removed wallpaper and that left the walls all scratched and ugly, you know what I mean. Now removing wall paper is probably worse than painting, but once it's done it doesn't have to be done again.

Just above is what the kitchen dinette looked like when we moved in. Quite a transformation isn't it. The other reason I am really disliking painting this time is it's taking me three coats of paint to cover the coral color. I thought two coats would do it. But no it's taking three coats and that's for a good quality paint. Maybe I should have primed the walls and then painted, but then I'd have to buy primer as well.

Which brings me to the another reason I hate painting. Going up and down the ladder is very tiring not to mention difficult for me with my tired old bones and bad back so I can only paint so much in one day and then I have to rest up. I painted one wall of the living room a white sandstone color which looks real nice. I thought it would only take two coast over the pale aqua color. No, that's taking three coats too. Now I'm wondering now why I decided to paint that room too. If only I could find a painter who wants some pottery.

By now you may be wondering about the title of this post. We decided we wanted a different dinette set for the kitchen dinette area. There's that budget thing cropping up again. I would love a rattan (click the link to find out how rattan is now being made into artificial bone) set like the one above, maybe a lighter color. They're very popular and cost an arm and a leg even for used. Perhaps not the best choice with three cats though. Anyway we've been looking on Craig's list and in second hand stores and just couldn't find anything we both could agree on or could afford. Finally Gary suggested we go to the Habitat for Humanity store. There are two in this county and the first one didn't have a dinette which was small enough to fit.

Yesterday we went to the second Habitat store and there was the oak pedestal table (in the first photo) but no chairs. It had a price of forty dollars on it. Neither of us could quite agree if it would look good in our dinette area. We also wondered if we could find some chairs which would go with it. We looked around the store for a while but kept coming back to the oak table. One of the guys who works in the store noticed us hemming and hawing over the table. He came over to see what our discussion was about. We chatted a while, still hemming and hawing, voicing our hesitations and indecision.

Finally the guy says to us, how about thirty dollars? That settled all our hemming and hawing, we took the table home. When we got home we started looking for chairs. Of course there were none to be found we could afford or that we thought would work with the oak table. We started wondering if we'd made a mistake buying a table with no chairs. As I was painting the wall in the dining room it dawned on me. We have a table we rarely use with six chairs in the dining room. I looked at the chairs and thought two of them would look just fine with the dinette table. What do you think? Sometimes (I think) hemming and hawing really pays off. Thanks for reading and for all your comments.