Red Echo

April 15, 2007

Right then, a quick weekend update before bed.

Yesterday morning, met Adam over at the Rocket Factory and helped pack a vanload of playa gear and other storables into our storage loft. John M. came over with his completely adorable daughter Isabella, who spent a lot of time standing on the ladder (and repeating, in a voice of surprised accomplishment, “Standing on the ladder!”). After we arranged all the plastic bins into nice pretty rows, we went back to Home Depot and bought some lumber for the remaining loft floor section.

Once cleaned up I drove north to my aunt Melinda’s place in Lynnwood for Grandma’s 80th birthday party. She was in good spirits and I think everyone enjoyed themselves. It’s always fun to spend time with my cousins. Why don’t I visit them more often? We drank wine, played cards, caught up on each other’s lives.

Evening: down to Columbia City for Jay & Lena’s housewarming, now that they’re no longer living downstairs. They have a funky new basement place with exposed ductwork, concrete floors, a prominent fusebox on the living room wall – it’s great. And now they have a whole room for music.

By the time I got to Kevin & Erica + Nathan & Miller’s housewarming, it was all I could do to greet everyone before I felt like I was falling asleep and had to start making the goodbye rounds. It’s a huge house, and all very new, so it was good to see all of our mutual friends there making it feel homey.

Today I started off with pancakes and then went straight over to Heden to work on the room. The drywall contractor came back and finished up the patches, so I put a coat of primer on two walls and spent a long, long time cleaning up not quite all of the layer of fine white dust covering the room. It’ll take a second and possibly a third mopping. Meanwhile I installed curtains and put the fourth coat of red paint on the accent wall. Maybe four will be enough? Red paint is transparent stuff.

Tonight, over to Peter & Jacqueline’s place for a sushi party, which also turned out to be Jacqueline’s birthday party. Conversation topics included microcontrollers, video games, the uses of various flammable gases and extremely cold liquids, and home renovation plans.

Now I am going to curl up in bed with a book.

Life is good.

3 Comments

  1. Colored paints can be very difficult to paint and get a nice deep color even with color primers (god forbid you used a white primer)
    I’ve used grey primers for some colors and red primers for others
    The last red walls I did were quite a bright red and it took 2 coats of red primer and 6 – yes 6 – coats of paint to get nice coverage with no signs of the red primer.
    I’m starting to like white a lot more :)

    Comment by norm — April 16, 2007 @ 10:45 am

  2. Yes, I made sure to use a red primer. Six coats of paint! Wow. Well, it does seem to get a little better each time. I will go back over later today and see how it’s doing. I think it may be OK if there are still some faintly visible roller lines, as long as the color seems even.

    Comment by mars — April 16, 2007 @ 10:58 am

  3. Yes – 6 :(
    It was a house the wife was working on and it had some very vibrant colors.
    A lot of colors required special primers (red and grey) but the red paint took the most coats to cover well.

    Comment by norm — April 16, 2007 @ 11:17 am