WATCHING PAINT DRY

There wasn't much time for words last weekend, even though, ultimately, I spent rather a lot of it watching paint dry… or rather waiting for paint to dry so that I could whack another coat on top of it and conceal the patchy mess I'd made of the first coat I'd put on.

You see, the decorating finally returned to the top of the agenda after having stalled when that period of relatively feverish post-building work activity ceased due to more personal problems taking priority.

Instead of completing what we'd started, we basically lived in the middle of a building site for six months, stepping gingerly around the decorating equipment in the darkness and waiting for a window of opportunity to present itself whilst getting used to the idea of bare plaster walls, unfinished woodwork, and the old paintwork, so battered and bruised by the construction work that went on around it.

But time marches on and, eventually, things need to be done and so the brushes were finally unwrapped, the paint tins dusted off, and the first tin of “kitchen and bathroom” paint from Dulux (or was it Crown…?) that we bought a couple of weekends ago finally (and amazingly) got to fulfill its destiny.

Now it’s up, at least on three of the walls – the fourth, with its half peeled paper from where the shower was installed, will need a little more thought – and it looks clean, bright and utterly Magnolia although, strangely, it calls itself “Snowdrop” if you read the label…

Funny, really, I’d have expected it to be slightly bluer or greener with a name like that.

This was, of course, not what had been planned. Way back in more colourful times we’d toyed with either a “Plum” or an “Aqua” colour and bought match-pots for both, but somehow we never got around to them and so neither got tried and we kind of got used to the colour of the pale plaster and thought that anything else might feel constricting after that.

So, after a rethink, we decided upon a similar colour to that which we’d chosen for the bedroom which was a rather appealing “Almond White” and then found that our local “B&Q” didn’t have more than one tin of that in the delightful sounding “Mould-free” version so necessary for that environment but, with a brief few steps along the aisle, “Snowdrop” became the fallback option of choice.

The funny thing about decorating, at least for those of people like me who prefer not to spend our every spare waking hour indulging in “home improvement” is that I have to learn the whole process all over again each and every time I make a start upon it.

All of the obvious little things which become almost routine once I’ve been up and at it for a couple of days, have to be recollected and I can spend a not inconsiderable amount of time indulging in basic faffing about digging out the old, rancid “decorating clothes” and putting down dustsheets and bashing the bits of decorating that I already have done with the ladder before that tin finally gets prised open and I then remember that I need to go off and find myself a stirring stick.

Actually, prising the lid off usually involves another delay as I turn the house upside-down looking for a screwdriver or something similar in order to even manage that.

After that, of course, the process of applying the paint to the wall becomes a relative breeze, once you’ve got past the initial huge splat which follows forgetting the precise science of handling a fully-laden paint roller or brush.

Oddly enough, whilst I’m never going to be an enthusiastic painter and decorator – although anyone who ever saw the floor whenever I used to paint scenery might think that I was a little too enthusiastic at times – and I find it all far too knackering and resent the time-consuming aspect of it, I usually find that I quite like handling the paint itself, and the science and mechanics and knack of getting it to flow from a brush in just such a way as to provide a clean edge where one surface meets another is one of the most satisfying quiet joys that there is.