Sunday, May 4, 2014

It's Ombre, Hombre!

Ombre. All the rage. When my hair looked like this, I either shrugged and went on my merry way or I scheduled an appointment to fix it. Granted, the color fade happened a little higher on my head for a while, but the concept was the same. Now people are paying to have their hair look like this. The Kardashians are championing it..  so it must be. . .uh. . .good?
Photo credit: adrants via Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-SA

I am a do it yourself kind of person. My husband is a pay anyone else to do it kind of person. I am starting to see value in my husband's eagerness to avoid DIY at all cost.

When I bought this house I loved it. It was chock full of opportunities. I could really make it my own. I loved the projects! I painted and tore down walls. I laid new flooring and added my own touches. I really felt pride in my house.

Then I had Eli.

Projects became a little more frustrating. I started many, many projects and finished a few of them. If I let things slide, I was still able to make an impact and tackle a project or two.

Now we are looking to sell this lovely house and as I look around I am surrounded by all the half finished projects that I thought I could tackle after I had Eli. With the addition of 2 more boys. . .well tackling laundry is project enough. The definition of "home improvement" changed to keeping the boys from tearing the house apart.

With three kids. . .projects are a lesson in frustration. For all involved.

I decided to go for it anyways. One project I had started when Eli was small enough to be content in his jumparoo outside was the fence. It wasn't that I ran out of time or steam. . .I ran out of stain. The death knell for any project. . .running out of something. I can keep staining but I CANNOT make another run to home depot and THEN finish. Somehow that extra step derails me.

And so for 2 years our fence looked like this:



Clearly that would be noticeable to prospective home buyers. I must finally correct this.

So I loaded up my feral boys and took them to the DEPOT. And I bought stain. Surely I looked to make sure that it would match the already existing stain. Surely. . .but I DID have the boys with me.

And it was not a perfect match but since I was going to clean the whole back fence it should be fine.

So I scrub and scrub that old fence. Every free moment I am out there scrubbing and finally the rain lets up enough for me to stain the fence.

One epic day of paint-the-fence. Perhaps my arms would once again regain the thin Ralph Macchio-esqueness of my youth.

Here is how it went:

One child at school. ..one napping...one running like a Tasmanian devil outside ...ready, set and stain stain stain!

I get half done. My arms feel like over-cooked spagetti. The portion I have done looks uniformly dark. SCORE!

Stop to get child from school.. .arrange lunch and nap time. Whack a mole.

I earn about 20 minutes to continue staining and I stain in hyper speed. With my spagetti arms.

The boys wake up but Pookie is still sleeping. I cannot be in two places at once and if I let the boys outside, they would likely pretend they are birds...bathing in the open stain can. I force them to be inside until Pookie gets up. Funny story, the boys were SO happy about this that Pookie was woken up by their squeals of delight in under 2 minutes.

Herd the boys outside. Mama commences with staining. ..there is just a little bit left. Pookie is in her left arm. . .staining pad in her right.

Stain.

Stain.

Stain.

AND DONE!


I clean up and let the boys terrorize the back yard and themselves.

I watch Eli pee on. the. fence.

And then I see it.

The stain.

Does.

Not.

Match.

In fact it appears orange.
red to brownish to orange. All in a day's work.

Orange?

Who stains a fence orange? Hmm....mamas that cannot pick out the right color because their crazy children make it hard to think at Home Depot.

Is it any better than the before picture?

I should have shaken the can of stain after each break. It appears the stain settled quickly....DOH.

Hello prospective home buyer! Look at this wonderfully fashionable fence! It's ombre hombre. Sadly, no stain job would hide our neighbor's awesome window paint statement.

This house is gonna sell itself.

Because it's gonna have to.









1 comment:

  1. I think timing is your issue.......someone needs to be with the boys while you paint........or paint when Gavin is home to and he can paint, or entertain the boys while you paint.. In other words, you need a second man or woman who can handle one of the options. Words of wisdom from an old lady, who did the same things when she had 3 boys running amuck. I think I mentioned that trying to paint the walls of one of the rooms, when the boys start chasing each other, hit my ladder and paint went all over my nice hard wood floors .:-)

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