Mars 2005 (2)

In March 2005 we began the job of sanding and painting the living room of the house we had bought nearly two years earlier. The sanding was the worst part. The walls had been coated with some kind of rough-textured material that was peeling off in places. We decided to sand it all down and get it as smooth as we could before we applied paint.

Can you imagine all the dust that the sanding produced? And it was going really slowly when I suddenly realized that we should go the the hardware store and buy a second sander so that the work would go faster. The little sanders we were using cost just 20 euros apiece. Above, you can see that the weather was cooperating, and being able to leave the doors and windows open helped get some of the dust out of the house.

Once we had finished sanding and throughly cleaned the floors, the painting could begin. First there was a primer coat of white paint. Neither of us had ever really done this kind of work before. In Washington DC where we first lived, and then in the San Francisco Bay Area, we were both working long hours at our jobs and didn't have time to do things like paint walls and ceilings. Besides, we had lived in rented apartments and houses from 1982 until 1995.

We must have sanded the walls for a few hours every morning for about three weeks. It wasn't all drudgery, though. With the sunny warm weather we were having, in the afternoon we could relax with a glass of wine out in the back yard. The dog back then, Collette, seemed to enjoy watching us work, and was happy to sit outdoors with us when our workday was done.