Painting

“What are ya painting up there, the Sistine Chapel?”

Probably comments deserved from your neighbor when you paint in your boxers with an open window from the heat, and also when you’ve been painting your apartment for four months. The kitchen is the last bit that I’m going to paint (the bedroom I’m calling good and not worrying about it - I can live with the dark blue, and I have no idea what other color to paint it).

My personal tastes in apartments have always gravitated to the bottom line - cheapest rent possible while retaining some sense of livability. Usually this means older houses or adaptations that give a place “run-down character” and “fading style”, as I like to think. Or, as a friend referred to my previous apartments, “shitholes - all of them”. She hasn’t seen the new place, but her assessment was the same.

“Dude, you rented it. Therefore, it’s a shithole. As long as it’s safe for Sam - not like that one place in Vermont with the misfiring gas heater, or the one with the rotting slate shower, or the one...”

Safety for Sam did send me running from a few places I would have happily taken back in my bachelor days, but calling the current apartment a “shithole” when moving in would probably have been generous. The carpets were a combination of beige and ground-in dirt, along with some burn marks. The landlord mentioned a mark on the wall from when he’d put in replacement windows five years ago. Most of the walls were a glossy beige, but the kitchen was a dirty primer white with cabinets covered in dust and falling wallpaper in the back.

However, for a range of reasons, I was anxious to move, and the apartment had two qualities I was desperately searching for - cheap rent and a month-to-month lease. I wasn’t expecting to stay long. This was temporary.

The landlord was great - he’s a DJ, and we talked shop for a while. He was very upfront about the place’s shortcomings, and about the ramifications of dealing with them.

“I could replace the carpet, but I’d have to raise the rent and it would take a couple of weeks.”

I can live with the carpet.

“I could paint the place, but it would take a couple of weeks.”

I can paint it - I’ve painted places before.

“Okay - just keep track of your supplies and take it off your rent. I’d prefer you went with beige, but I am giving you the place with a dark blue bedroom, so I guess I really can’t say much about color.”

My plan was actually to go with pretty neutral colors - actually mostly beige. My energy levels were up and down, so even getting the place primed took effort, room by room. The plan was to repair the apartment as a way to repair myself as well, and leave a well put-back together apartment after six months or so.

By the beginning of June, however, it was apparent that things wouldn’t be going according to plan, and I was going to be here a lot longer than six months. I’d done much of the priming and repair to the cabinets in preparation for color, but now I had no idea of which direction to go. Shitholes had always been temporary - I moved about once a year when I lived in apartments, and never did very much with them. Financially, I knew I wasn’t likely to move for a while. And Sam was going to need some consistency about things. So I was here. Time to settle in.

The taking five months has been finding out I care about what the place looks like. (Not that anyone’s seen it besides Sam, and I don’t think he really cares that much.) It’s been more than patching holes and throwing up paint. It’s been a careful selection of color choices. It’s been buying stuff to put on the walls. Installing venetian blinds. Carefully painting the inside cabinets. Changing out plastic towel racks and paper towel holders for metal and bamboo.

I went with a flat enamel finish - flat enamel is much more forgiving of uneven lathe and plaster walls. So the painting required a coat of primer and two coats of color to get anything looking good.

It’s also been picking out furniture, which has been kind of an odd thing as well. My yard sale luck has been phenomenal this summer, as I found a good fold-down table, good kitchen chairs, and a nice rocking chair. Again, the idea that I care what the place looks like is kind of odd.

Might be because I’m 37 and no longer the 20-something who stuffed the shitholes of yore with whatever crap I could find. Or who only painted one of them (the Winthrop apartment) due to a drunken “discussion” that involves a brushstroke of primer across the wall at 2am. (Painted white - landlord just about fell over in shock when I moved out.) Post-30, maybe I just need a certain level of civilization and refinement.

Though more of it seems to be the apartment as a metaphor for where I am. A place to be repaired and restored. Maybe, if I could get this place looking respectable again, there might be hope for me to regain a foothold for where I was. Though now, with everything finished, I have to move on to other things. I have repaired the place. Time to move on to repairing other things.