I did not end up having to prime the scary yellow patches, because as scary as they might have been, they were still light enough to paint over without bleeding through. This afternoon I headed back to the hardware store, where they now recognize me, after three visits in less than a week. A very nice man at the paint counter helped me pick out a few paint cards, and then sent me home with two huge flipbooks of cards displaying every single color ever made by Benjamin Moore, and despite being completely overwhelmed by choices, I actually was able to find one that more closely resembled what I had been imagining in my head. Back to the hardware store, and then back home again with a gallon of paint in the color Elephant Tusk, and I got to painting, because at this point I figured even if I absolutely hated it, I only have to look at it as long as it takes to sell this house.

Richard enjoys painting just about as much as he enjoys being strung up by his toes, so he didn’t do any brush-wielding. However, he rescued me from the tedium of paint preparation by taping off sections of the wall for me so I wouldn’t have to do it (because the taping is the part of painting I hate most of all). It might have gone faster if I had used a roller, but my experience with rollers is that they are far more likely to splatter fine particles of paint everywhere (including on me) and I have much more control over the splattering when I use a brush. So it took me about three hours, total, to do the wall (interspersed with dinner and watching an episode of Veronica Mars on DVD), but the extra time was more than worth it when compared to the distinct lack of paint anywhere but on the wall, where it was supposed to be. And when I was done, I pulled off the tape and damn if it doesn’t look almost exactly like what I had hoped it would be. The fireplace build-out really pops out of that wall and it looks amazing.

There’s been other progress on the house as well over the past two days. A small work crew of two have been cutting and painting and fixing and replacing all the trim on the exterior (and there is a *lot* of trim on our exterior), and when we got home today, we discovered that they’d installed the new railings around the front and back porch, and also suddenly we have a great big front porch we never knew was there. It is amazing to me how a space that looked so tiny when it wasn’t enclosed can look suddenly larger simply by the addition of walls. It makes me want to put a little bistro set out there so we can drink coffee in the morning and listen to the birds in the tiny little forest in the neighbors’ back yards, and watch the picturesque farming equipment rolling around in the fields past the end of the street. Here’s hoping it makes someone else – someone with enough money to buy our house – feel the same way.