Monday Morons--What kind of paint is this?

Okay, if you've been reading, the kitchen wall that was half removed years ago to deal with a plumbing problem and never replaced was reported again about a month ago, was supposed to be repaired last Monday, no one came until Tuesday, a four hour break was taken to go do repairs at someone else's house, repairs at my place were not finished Tuesday and not resumed until after three on Wednesday, and then it still wasn't painted and so someone came to do that on Thursday.

Okay, so the paint he used was white. I think the can said pure white. But I'm pretty sure that the old paint was not pure white. It doesn't exactly match.

Besides the old paint not exactly matching the new paint, I have been here a while, and there are places that need touch-up paint. Or maybe it is just time to paint again.

Where I live, when you leave you have to paint the place either white or off-white, so that the place is all nice and new looking for the new person. If the new person doesn't like white, they can paint it again, as long as when they leave they paint it white again. If you use expensive paint, it probably doesn't matter what color you paint over, but usually it is easier to paint white over white than white over a darker color.

Anyway, I'm guessing that the people in the small apartments probably aren't planning to stay long, and they probably keep the white. The people in the houses stay longer, or at least probably plan to stay longer, and I'm guessing that more of them paint over the white with different colors or add wallpaper and such.

I just kept the white both times. I like white.

Okay, but trying to match a white or off-white paint is hard to do, unless maybe someone was nice and left you a bit of the paint in the can, or left you a note saying which white paint you used. If I remember correctly, I left almost a gallon of some sort of off-white paint for the apartment's new renters. It wasn't going to do me any good anyway, since the paint I used in the apartment was a few shades darker than what was used in the new place.

No one left me any paint at the new place, or the name of the paint, or anything. But I didn't think that getting the name of the paint would be a problem, since this place was not painted by the person leaving, but by the maintenance guys. I just thought that whenever I needed to know, I'd just ask the guys what paint they used when they had to paint a place themselves.

Well, I don't seem to have made myself understood. I don't think that the old paint was pure white, and the guy won't tell me the name of the old paint.

I've thought of four possible reasons that I am not being told specifically what kind of paint was used on my house six years ago.

Possibility #1--They are deliberately being annoying.

Possibility #2--I suppose that they might have used a different color back then, and then there was some financial gain for switching to a different color or a different brand, and they just don't remember the name of the paint they used before. I don't think this is really what happened, just wanted to show that I was smart enough to figure out that it might have happened. And even if there were some financial reason for switching paints, you would think that they'd still have records of what the old paint was and when they switched paints and such.

Possibility #3--They had to switch paints because the old paint either isn't made anymore, or isn't sold at the local store. Again, they should have records of this and should be able to tell me about it.

Possibility #4--They are just stupid. They use different color paints whenever they have to paint something. The paint is selected on a whim. They have a little bit of paint left over from several projects, and it goes to waste, because the next time they need paint they buy yet a different color.

I am thinking that if it isn't just the first explanation then it is the fourth one, cause the other two make sense, and they should have no trouble telling someone an explanation if it made sense like that. They are annoying and/or just stupid.

Okay, so now that I've had that problem with the paint from the people who supposedly work for me, I have more fun at Home Depot.

I'm thinking that the guys just went to Home Depot and bought whatever paint was cheapest. I seem to recall doing that myself (though I might have gone to Lowe's instead). If you just want white or off-white, and you aren't trying to match something, there are a few that don't cost too much that come in 5 gallon buckets. So probably, if I find the cheapest 5 gallon bucket, the lightest color that isn't pure white is probably the one that they used.

So I see at the end there's 5 gallon buckets for about fifty dollars, and they say something like professional grade. And I think that one of those would be it, if they were the same kind of paint sold six years ago. But I can't find any paint chips or a color chart or anything for them. I see that they come in at least three colors--white, aspen white, and antique white.

Aspen white sounds nice, but I don't want to buy any without at least a paint chip (and I would prefer an actual sample of paint to take home and try before buying five gallons of the stuff). I ask someone for help, but they don't have either samples or paint chips or a color chart or anything. And I can't get help from anyone else who knows anything about the paint. I can complain to this girl's boss, but that doesn't help me with the paint. She keeps saying that the paint is mostly used by professionals, so that they don't have samples and paint chips.

I don't see how being professional equals not needing to know what color paint is in the bucket.

Are the professionals psychic or something? Is there some secret handshake you have to know before being shown what color paint is in the container?

Another girl comes and wants to color match the paint for me. The first girl had wanted to do that too, but I didn't want to. Having the color matched doesn't tell me what color is in the 5 gallon container. It is a different kind of paint from a different company that can be color matched. But somehow I'm talking to this second girl, and she's doing the color match thing and telling me it will be eight dollars for a quart. I'm agreeing to it (I don't know why), but then she says the paint is ten dollars a quart, not eight.

Okay, I went thinking that I was going to spend two dollars on a paint sample for something that I could later buy in a gallon can and a five gallon bucket. Then it goes up to eight dollars for a quart, and then it turns out that the paint is ten dollars for a quart. And that still doesn't tell me what color paint is in the 5 gallon bucket for fifty dollars, so if I use a lot of the color matched paint instead of whatever is in the 5 gallon bucket, I will be spending thirty dollars a gallon. That's about three times what I had planned to spend.

At that point I leave and decide to go to Lowe's the next day.

I find some paint in five gallon buckets for sixty dollars, and there is at least a color chart for that. There are no samples, but by now I'm ready to give up and start with a new color paint if necessary to avoid spending thirty dollars a gallon on color matching.

I end up spending fourteen dollars on a gallon of plain white paint. Maybe it will match, and maybe it won't. If it doesn't, well, it's probably time to repaint anyway, and I will repaint it something that doesn't need color matching. I'm testing a bit of it right now. In an hour it will either dry too light or a shade darker and be exactly what I want, but I think I'm okay with it either way. I'm ready to just start painting and be done with it.

Repairs still aren't done

Okay, they were supposed to come and fix the wall on Monday. They didn't come at all on Monday. Tuesday, they came before nine, so I had to send them away for a bit. They came back at about ten, did some work, said they were going to get some supplies, didn't come back for a bit so I assumed that they were on lunch break.

After being gone about four hours, I called and complained. They'd been sent to fix another problem somewhere else, without finishing at my house.

That's what caused the problem in the first place, but here they're doing it again.

They came back a bit after four, but having less than an hour to work, they didn't finish.

Wednesday, they didn't show up until after three. It doesn't look too bad, considering what crap they were given to work with. The new paneling doesn't match up with the old, but half of that will be hidden once the stove is put back in place, and I'm planning to do something with the rest of the wall, either magnets or hooks or something, so that I can store cookie sheets there.

But even if I don't do anything, and just have mismatched panelling, it is nice to have a solid wall again.

Now it is Thursday, and the wall still needs to be painted. And they don't know when or if they might get to that today or tomorrow.

You just would not believe the junk they used to fix this wall. And there's no order to it at all. No real plan. The studs are not evenly spaced. It all looks good from the outside, but inside it's all crap.

I could do crap by myself.

Anyway, if they do not come and finish the work today, I will have to put everything back the way it was Friday. I have to bake cookies or something for a social thing Saturday, and I can't do that with the stove out from the wall and my only counter space in another room. They will have to make an appointment for next week and do all the moving and such themselves when they get here to do the painting.

More repairmen

The day after I posted about how I did not like people in my house, the temporary manager and one of the maintenance guys came by to see the hole in the wall, or rather, the half of the wall that is there and the half that is not there. The half of the wall that is not there was cut away so that the maintenance guys could make some repairs. They were supposed to come back the next day and fix the wall.

That was a few years back that they were supposed to fix the wall. It might have been back before I started writing this blog.

Anyway, I waited for them to fix the wall, and for about a month they gave me excuses about needing to buy something to make it look nice, or that my repairs had been pushed back a bit so that they could go and deal with something else, some emergency at a neighbor's house.

After about two months had gone by with no repair and no word as to when the repair would be made, I called the office to ask about it. I was told that they didn't know anything about it. There was no work order.

I didn't know that you needed a second work order to come and finish the first one. You just should know that you aren't finished and come and do the work.

But whatever. There's a second work order, but now I would have to wait my turn like everyone else. It was just a cosmetic thing, not an emergency.

They still didn't come and fix the thing.

I got tired of trying to clean around the cut off part of the wall that was just there in my kitchen, so I took all the pieces and put them outside. I have covered parking, so I thought that as long as it was right there in the front it would not get rained on or anything.

After a while I got a notice to get rid of trash that was on my front porch. I did have several things on my front porch that I am not really supposed to store there, but I don't have any other good place to put them. None of that stuff was trash, it was all building materials and stuff for either the garden or art class. I moved the garden and art class stuff and left the kitchen wall.

Some time went by, and I got another notice about trash on the porch, this time with a picture of the offending items.

I moved them to the back porch. I'm afraid a lot of time went by and I didn't give much thought to the half missing kitchen wall. I had more important things to deal with--homewrecking sluts, floods, health problems, etc....

At some point I got another notice to get rid of the "trash", and then I got an actual warning from the city in the spring.

At that point, thought it didn't look too bad, I did think that maybe the wall had been out in the elements too long, and it might be trash, or close enough to it that I should just have new materials. So I put the "trash" out on the curb, and it was taken away on the next garbage pick-up day.

So now, this temporary manager is asking where the other piece of the wall is, and I told him after getting three notices to throw it away that is what I did.

And he just talks some more, like I don't know that he is the one who had the city come out and order the "trash" removed, like none of this is his doing, like it is all someone else's fault, like it isn't the same maintenance guy that started the whole problem in the first place still being in charge (though the guy that came to fix the other problems had nothing to do with it, he was just confirming that there was still this big hole in the wall).

The manager told the maintenance guy that he needed to do some other thing while the wall was still open like that. I don't really get what that was about, just some other thing having to do with the hot water heater.

They were supposed to do the repair yesterday.

I cleaned up the kitchen a bit and moved things around so that the guys could do the repairs. So I had to push the cabinet out of the way and clean behind it, so that they could move the stove away from the wall, and I cleaned behind where the stove was. And then my husband was about to leave for another trip, so we went to Denny's before he left. And I expected the maintenance guys to be there when we got back, but they weren't. But they don't open the office til nine, and it was only about ten, so I thought they'd be by soon.

Having a frig full of leftovers, but no way to heat them up in the microwave with the rearranged kitchen, I went to get gas and a drink and bought a hotdog at RaceTrac.

They did not come by all day.

This morning I slept late, but I wasn't in a hurry, since I was still up by eight and they didn't open the office til nine. I was just about to get a bath when one of the maintenance guys showed up ready to work.

I told him to come back in an hour, as I had not yet washed my hair or the dishes.

He didn't argue.

Well, I can't shower with a stranger in the house, and I can't wash dishes while he works on the wall, cause there isn't room for us both to be next to the sink at the same time.

He came back about ten, and did whatever it was with the pipe from the hot water heater, and now he's gone to lunch and to get some materials for actually fixing the wall.

I wonder if it might actually get all done today.

I don't like people in my house

Okay, I had grand dreams of being a normal person and occasionally having people over to my home. That happened a bit when I had the apartment. I felt normal, and people came by once in a while, just that they couldn't really stay long, cause I didn't have a couch and such.

Then I got this place about a year or two before I was ready to move, and I thought, now I have space, and we'll get stuff. We'll buy a couch. Not that I want a lot of people over to my house, just that I would have a normal place where people could come by and I wouldn't be embarrassed to let them in.

Six years later, the situation just got worse. And of course, still no couch.

Since I have been in this house, I've had like four storage units. One of those was just to help with the moving, and we didn't keep it for long. Two were mostly for business stuff, and we had those forever but no more. And then I had one that was just my junk. And I didn't have the money to keep paying to store my junk. I thought that it would help me clean the house. I thought that it would allow me to slowly make everything the way I wanted, and once the house was clean and furniture bought and such, I would bring in the stuff from storage (after making periodic trips to storage and getting rid of some of it), and then everything would go in it's proper place and everything would be neat and tidy, mostly. I do too many projects for everything to stay neat and tidy for long.

As it turns out, making periodic trips to the storage unit mostly did not happen, and when they did happen they did not last long or result in accomplishing much work. First, you have to go when the weather is nice, and of course when the weather is nice you probably have something else planned. Then, when the weather is nice so that you can tolerate being in this big metal container, you don't stay long, maybe twenty or thirty minutes, unless one of the things you are storing there is a nice comfortable chair. And then to stay much more than an hour and get real work done I'd need a ladies room, and to really spend the afternoon or the whole day working I'd need a kitchen to get cold drinks and snacks and lunch.

So I never actually did any work at the storage unit like I imagined, and while it helped having a bit of empty space so that I could clean, eventually this did not work out either, as I filled in the empty space with more stuff.

So, the storage stuff came home, and during the week I emptied the space I threw out a few things. I figured that I would sort out the rest a few boxes at a time, and that it would all be dealt with at a rate of about a box per day over a month or two, and then everything would be good, and I would maybe get a couch.

That didn't happen either.

Five years after moving here, I think that it is time for some major stuff and some touch up paint here and there, and maybe some places where the whole wall needs to be repainted. But of course that didn't happen, cause I still had so much stuff.

Recently, I have done some cleaning in areas that I have not seen in about five years. I am trying to empty all of the closets so that I can sweep and clean (and look for termites) and such. I have found damaged stuff that I threw away, and stuff that I mean to give away, and stuff that I don't even know what it is and my husband will have to look through it. And this is a lot of work that takes me a lot of time, and it will all be for nothing if I just put everything back the way that it was.

So I am trying to pull everything out of the closets, which puts stuff either in the hall or the back room, and so the stuff that was already in the hall and back room gets put into the living room or the dining area. And it's going to stay there until I am happy with the closets being sufficiently cleaned.

So while this is going on, I also decide to tile under the kitchen sink (which is still not finished because I have the wrong tools for cutting those last few tiles), and after months of being promised a visit from the exterminator they finally pay him to do the job.

So while I do not normally like to have people in my house and the place isn't clean and neat and tidy, now it is even less neat and tidy than usual, but the exterminator is nice and says that he understands and tries to work around the junk anyway. I did at least know what day he was coming (they told us on a Monday afternoon that he was coming sometime on Wednesday), so I at least was able to clear the hall and the bedroom, cause I needed him to look at that thing growing out of the wall and ceiling. But other than that, there was still junk everywhere.

And then while he was there, he took a picture of the hole in my kitchen wall. A hole in my kitchen wall doesn't really describe the problem. Half of my wall is missing. They cut it away to do a repair and then never fixed it, though they have been ordered to do so twice before. So a picture was taken to remind them of it, and they were ordered to fix it again, though it took them more than two weeks to acknowledge they were supposed to do something about it.

So, I got a phone message, and I thought that they might be coming out on Monday. The drains in the bathroom are slow, and I thought that they should check those before working on the wall, in case it was a serious plumbing problem that would again require them to remove half of the wall. So I called about that, and about a light switch that didn't work, and they said that they did have an order to fix the wall, but that it would be a few days (I'm thinking a week or two when they say that), because other people have broken water heaters and such that have to be repaired first. I mention the bathroom drains and the light switch, and they make a note of it.

So I'm thinking the end of the week or next week. But they come the next day to check the bathroom. Since they didn't say that they were coming, I did not clear the hall or put away some things in the bathroom. In fact, I was halfway into cleaning the tub when my husband suggested I watch some TV cable thing he had downloaded on the computer, and so when the repair guys come they have to push cleansing powder and other such chemicals out of the way in addition to stuff that you normally move out of the way to check for bathroom plumbing problems.

Well, I don't like having these guys around, but after having the exterminator in twice I guess that I'm getting used to having repair people in my house stepping around the junk. But really, I would have cleared those areas first if they would just tell me when they are coming.

They did not fix the wall, cause that would take more of their time than they can spare right now with the neighbors having broken water heaters and such, and they did not say when they might return to fix it, or if there will be repairs to the bedroom wall, which I imagine the inside was all eaten by termites.

So I guess that they will be back at the end of the week, or maybe next week. Or maybe they will again pretend the work is finished and not come back at all.