Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-06-16 - 7:58 p.m.

House Beautiful

There IS progress, of sorts.

I discovered and bought last week a new product, hard plastic sliding strips you attach to the bottom of heavy furniture that makes it slide like magic across any surface. Like magic, I tell you! It said so! As Seen on TV! I don't think I have ever bought anything that was As Seen on TV before, but this was irresistible. Had a picture of a woman pushing a chair right across the floor! Just pushing it, all by her very own self! A whole chair! I know they don't lie on TV, so I know these strips will allow me to move my enormous computer desk back into place without any help at all, striking yet another blow for the Intelligent and Independent Single Female Consumer.

But first I must figure out how to get them ON...even Older Daughter is still too small to tip the desk so I can put them on, and I'm certainly not enough of a EvilMom to tip it myself and make her put her little hands under it ("Well, you were never all that good at the flute BEFORE, so quit your whining.") So I may have to holler for the neighbors again.

I hate hollering for the neighbors, but I do it. There were two screws that I could not, could NOT, get out of the cabinets. The heads were already rounded from when they were installed, and I probably rounded them worse even using all the pressure I had in me, and I fussed with them for days with the cabinet doors hanging cattywampus accusing me of ineptitude every time I looked. So I finally threw myself on John next door's mercy (eye-batting quit working about five or ten years ago, now I have to cry) and he came and did the manly thing, which is to say he broke the heads off the screws and said, "Paint over them and put the new hinges up higher." See, I wouldn't have done that. I would have gone and spent money on buying a set of EZouts to fit the electric drill and messing with them until I got them out and if I had to helicoil the damn cabinet (can you helicoil wood?) I would have done it and it would have taken me fifty dollars and a week of work and three trips to the hardware store, just so I wouldn't have to admit that those screws got the best of me. Of course, you can't say they got the best of John, either, consider he twisted their little heads right off, so I'm not very sure of my philosophy here, exactly, except to say that it seems to take me an awful long time to do things my way.

And I am not happy with the way the kitchen is turning out. Not happy, I tell you. There's a spot up on the window framing where I can plainly see uneven brush marks in the high-gloss, and the ceiling looks a little patchy in the wrong light. There are several a place on the edge of the countertop where the old paint shows through on the wrong side of the caulk line, and I'm still wrestling with the cove base which seems to creep right up the wall until there's a gap between the cove toe and the vinyl floor - and then it falls off altogether. Shall I go on? I know I'm never going to see any of these things; if I had to guess, I would guess my finishing workmanship is probably better than the contractor's crew that built the place - at least I will bet that they did not have an Xacto knife, a box of q-tips and some fine-point tweezers in their painting kits like I do - but damnit, it isn't perfect, and I want it to be.

Where does this need for perfection come from? Do I think people will come in and say, "Wow, look at that kitchen - but that cove molding looks like shit, doesn't it?" MY friends? In THIS house? If they make it into the kitchen at all, they are busy rubbing the bruises from their shins from the scooters they fell on after tripping over the pile of laundry hiding the extra computer monitor. Really, the cove base is just not going to come up. I know that.

Me? Will it bother me? Let me give you a hint. The man that delivered the new stove while I was at work left a large black case containing some sort a major Daywalt tool on the floor in the dining room. I didn't notice it for three days. I'm not very likely to skip a meal because it bothers me to look at the brush marks on the window frame.

So I don't know why it's frustrating to me that I can't get it perfect, or I think I can't get it perfect. I'm sure when the project is over and done, when I am down to the point where I think, "I'll just leave the denatured alcohol and the q-tips and knife out here on the counter so I can clean up the mistakes when I notice them," that I'll get working on something else and never notice the kitchen's shortcomings (except that it is STILL not self-cleaning.) It's just getting to that point that's tough.

If I get too hard on myself, I can think about the guy I bought the place from. There's till plenty of HIS workmanship to admire - like how he put tile on the guest bathroom floor and not only did his grout lines wander all over, he GROUTED THE TOILET TO THE FLOOR. I may leave brush marks, but I don't think I can beat that.

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