Adsense

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

I'm Carrie, and I have PADD (and a cleaner garage, and a fondness for doing things on the cheap, and a crayfish)

I have diagnosed myself with PADD, which is like ADD except it specifically concerns painting.

I have many symptoms of PADD.  For example, I hyperfocus on the need for paint in the house, either because the paint is dirty, scuffed up or worn or because I am tired of the color.  I am impulsive about painting; I tend to just up and decide to paint.  I also have emotional difficulties....not about paint, but about everything else.

This year I have painted 3 bathrooms and the garage (in addition to hiring a painter to paint the dining room, kitchen, family room, hallways, foyer and stairs).  Because I don't like to waste and am cheap, I used the same color paint in 2 of the bathrooms, and leftover paint from the dining room in the third bathroom.  I am going to use the leftover gray paint from the garage to paint the kids' bathroom.

I painted it lavender when N was about 3 years old, and now that I have 2 little boys also sharing that bathroom it seems a little too frou-frou.  Plus, I put cutesy little fish wallpaper up in spots and wrote "Under the Sea," when N was completely engrossed in Disney Princesses.  Five years in kid-time is like 20 years in adult-time.

I am keeping the fish wallhangings and shower curtains---just changing the paint color.



The garage looks much better now that a coat of non-flat paint is up; we've been in the house 11 years, and the walls were downright funky.  Garages, like ovens, should be self-cleaning.

D is going to hang organizing grid all over the place for rakes/shovels/brooms and hooks for hanging bikes up.  Perhaps we will have room to walk around our cars when all this is done.




N is going to dress up as The Mad Hatter for Halloween this year.  Being the cheapskate I am, I found directions for making a hat out of cardboard online.  I used old fabric I already had, a glue gun, a Halloween pin I bought a few years ago and a green popsicle stick to make this:



We also have a new pet in the house....a crayfish from N's class.  At first I put Poo (her name) in a blue plastic bin, but I didn't like the look of it on my kitchen counter.  So I decided to make use of a dip tray I never use.  I added some aquarium rocks I had in the basement, and voila!  Poo has a nice home.


This is mostly what I've been up to these weeks when I wasn't planning or celebrating boy birthdays or writing articles for my freelance work.

2 comments:

Swistle said...

Dip tray aquarium = genius.

Keri said...

That painting quirk of yours is hilarious to me, and slightly beyond my comprehension. Painting is among my least favorite activities, and I'm kinda like the absent-minded professor when it comes to stuff that's in the background of my home ( like paint colors, kid-writing on the walls, dustwebs in the ceiling corners...) I can't imagine putting the thought and energy into frequent and spontaneous painting, but I'm sure your home is much fresher- and more contemporary-looking than mine is!

The Mad Hatter had is adorable. Great use of fabric scraps!