home improvement

okay, here is a little known fact about me. and honestly, i think most people don't know this. i LOVE do-it-yourself home improvement projects. no kidding. it's an illness. when i was in high school, my junior year, we moved into this house that my mom is now. (the same house that i'm mooching free room and board out of) and i told her one day that i wanted to do a fish bathroom upstairs. i think i saw it in a magazine one day. and shockingly she let me do it. actually she did majority of the work that time because i'm not artsy at all. i can't paint fish that look like fish, it's a physically impossibility. so, i just moved home about a month ago and i mention to my mom that it may be time to redo the fish bathroom.

-on a side note, my brother absolutely hates this fish bathroom. he went out to dinner one night and got food poisoning from fish... orange ruffie to be exact... and he came home and was throwing up in this bathroom. and he continually tells me about how he's throw up and then look at the orange fish on the wall and then throw up again, so it was time for change for all of us. -

so, i mention to my mom, i think it's time to redo it and she said she wanted to stick to something that would match the new towels she just got and i was off on my home improvement agenda. here are my pictures from today... all in one day... and keep in mind it had waves and rainbow fish on the walls.






so, here's the downside of my liking to do home improvement projects. two things actually.

1. i can't paint to save my life. i'm not being modest. it's true. i helped paint my sisters new house when they first moved in years ago and i can't paint. they kept demoting me on my jobs. i put up tape. i use an edger, it just does nothing and i get paint everywhere. so the fact that i did the whole bathroom by myself is a miracle all in itself. however, i have been told multiple times that i am the THE person to have around while moving things. i have freakish strength, i don't really get it. i remember, again when my sister was moving into her house a few years ago, adam, my brother-in-law tried to have my sister help him move a gigantic refrigerator into a pick up truck and they couldn't do it so i went over to help. i think his exact words were, "next time we move, i'm calling you first." it's strange, I'll be the first to admit.

2. i am the poster child for ADD. and with ADD comes something called hyper focus. and hyper focus is why i'm still awake right now. if you don't know what that is, the best way for me to describe it is that you have an idea of something you want to accomplish and you get it in your mind and it's something that takes over. nothing else matters, there could be a million other things that are easier, faster and more important and it doesn't matter. you'll spend as much time as it takes to get it done but it has to get done. hence the reason the bathroom is done and i'm now sorting and organizing everything i own. the bathroom took me about seven hours start to finish taping, priming, painting, drying, painting, hanging things on the walls, cleaning the drawers, cleaning the closet. it's an illness. and with hyper focus... it's like putting blinders on a horse. it doesn't phase me that i missed lunch and dinner, it just needed to get done. and that my friends, is one more thing you probably didn't know about me.

one more bit, i left for california a non-cleaner, i came home a clean freak. it bothers me to have things out of place. it's sick, it goes back to the hyper focus thing. so either i clean and can't stop (like right now) or i can't clean because it won't end until i've done it all.

one more side note. my nieces adia and tori are here for the next two weeks and adia is... how to say this... a drama queen. if she sneezes and it hurts, you'll think shes having her heart cut out with a spoon (thank you monty python!). so, she runs into the door frame today, multiple times, but on one of the occasions my brother looks at me and says, "gutsy but clutsy." so great but so TRUE

heres to another couple hours of meaningless cleaning ...