Painting the house takes us out of our environment

Vic and I have entered the twilight zone of home renovation, where everything moves in slow motion and time blurs. We’ve spent the past few weeks preparing to paint my new office, which was our former library/guest room.

First, we carried out boxes and boxes of books and papers, and divested ourselves of most of the furniture. Going through the old clothes in the guest-room closet was the only fun part. We found my leather miniskirts and Vic’s Italian disco suit from the late 1970s. We even found my batik dresses and Vic’s old Army clothes from our hippie days. We saved a few reminders of our youth and took the rest to the Salvation Army.

We’ve always had all the walls and baseboards in our house painted whatever color of white our painter decided to use. But we’ve been watching “Clean House” and other home renovation shows lately. We decided to attempt a bolder look and do it ourselves.

I brought home a zillion paint chips from Home Depot, holding them up to the walls and rejecting them one by one. I couldn’t figure out what colors went well together.

Then my daughter-in-law Nicole told me about www.Behr.com. What a breakthrough. Behr’s computer program became my home decorator. I picked a main color, and the program suggested colors that matched. It even let me “paint” different walls of a model room online to see how the colors might look next to each other.

Our son Scott was coming up from San Diego two Sundays ago to paint, but I still hadn’t picked my colors. I had pretty much run the range of blues without settling on a color scheme.

In a last-minute switch, I went with a pale aquamarine for three walls, a muted green for the accent wall and a semi-gloss cream for the trim and sliding closet doors. Behr calls them Aegean Mist, Southern Breeze and Beach White.

Scott spent most of Sunday two weeks ago prepping the room, taping the baseboards, removing switchplates and laying plastic dropcloths.

Next, he spackled the nicks in the walls and then cut in the corners. That means using a paintbrush to paint the edges before using a roller to paint the walls. With Scott doing all of the work, painting the room “ourselves” was going very well.

Scott came up after work the next day and continued painting. He primed the outside of the closet doors, putting latex-based primer over the old oil-based paint. But it got late and he had to go home.

That left the rest to Vic and me. No worries, I thought. I’ve painted before — but not since the late 1980s.

It was amazing how much I had forgotten about painting. And how many trips I had to make to Home Depot to pick up yet another item that we needed.

The first mistake I made was painting the front of the big sliding closet doors first. That meant that I had to turn them over to prime the backside after the front was painted. The doors are 4 by 8 feet and weighed more than a stack of Bolsa Chica Environmental Impact Reports.

I enlisted Vic’s help to flip them over. It was a disaster. We cut a big gouge in one of the freshly painted walls when flipping one of the doors. We were right back at square one with spackling and repainting the wall.

Newspaper stuck to the fresh paint on the outside of the other closet door, so I had to repaint it, too. Those home makeover shows make it look so easy. I felt more like I was in a Laurel and Hardy movie than on “Clean House.”

After cutting in the same corners a few times first with green and then cream and then back to green, we finally got the lines straight.

Fortunately, we also had some fun this past weekend.

We attended the Friends of Shipley Nature Center plant sale on Saturday. We picked up some Douglas iris, Cleveland sage and a Catalina cherry tree for our yard. The sale was a huge success, making a lot of money for the Friends to help them continue with restoration.

While I cleaned up from painting on Sunday, Vic went birding with Mark Singer, Tom Benson and Roy Poucher. They were competing in a bird-a-thon for the Point Reyes Bird Observatory. They found an impressive 145 species in one 24-hour period in Orange County. That’s a lot of birds for October, but they almost had 146 species.

As in fishing, the ones that got away are sometimes the best stories. At Santiago Oaks, a fellow birder told them that a white-throated swift had just been there, but that it didn’t look healthy. Unfortunately, a raven got to it first. All that the guys saw was the swift being carried away by the raven. Dead birds don’t count.

After a long day of birding, Vic re-hung the painted closet doors and put the doorknob back on the room door.

It took us a week to finish painting a simple 9 by 10-foot room. We want to paint my old office and Vic’s office next. Scott says he’s busy.