Nine Dark Moons 
Last time I cleaned our basement cage was summer 2012. It was so neat and tidy! Somehow between summer 2012 and February 2014 it looked like a bomb went off – you couldn’t even walk into the cage! So I spent 4 hours yesterday moving pretty much everything out of the cage, vacuuming the space with my new shop vac, and laying down our old living room rug for a nice, homey feel. Then I moved everything back in, with a new layout.
So… yesterday afternoon, to distract myself from the train wreck of the girl cave bookcase and ceiling lights, I grabbed one of the recessed lighting trim pieces from the living room, brought it down to the basement, and spray-painted it white. It took 2 coats to cover the black. Once it dried, I popped it back into the living room ceiling. And… It’s too white. *SIGH*.
So I had a mini meltdown last night. Caused by a string of events that started yesterday afternoon when I learned from my mom that the small bookcase I’d painted dark purple in the girl cave was originally painted with oil. Which explains why the paint wasn’t sticking. Which means a total re-do that will be 3x more work than the original paint job I did. Sanding off the latex. Priming with BIN sealant. Repainting with dark purple latex.
I have learned a lot since January. Which I realize was only 6 days ago, but still. I now know more about recessed lighting than I ever wanted to, and I learned it’s a bad idea for me to staple wires to anything, especially a ceiling.
We have [*cough* UGLY *woof*] recessed lighting throughout our condo. It’s very 1980’s. They look like putting green holes to me. Like I should be standing on the ceiling hitting golf balls towards them. They’re also reminiscent of “whack-a-mole” [although having moles popping out at random intervals, singing happy mole songs to me, would be AWESOME! *daydream*]…
Back in January, I started painting the small bookcase in the girl cave Benjamin Moore’s Galaxy, same as the ceiling. I thought it would look really nice, and it did! On Tuesday I learned I made the ever popular DIY mistake of painting latex over oil [my parents gave me the bookcase recently, but I had no idea they’d painted it with oil like 40 years ago – GAH!]. It’s one of those mistakes that almost every DIY’er makes once, but isn’t likely to repeat.
After realizing Bonkers was never going to use the nice ramp I built him for the dining room platform, I caved and built him a lower platform to use as a step to get to the windowsill platform.
Yesterday I was home due to the Federal holiday, so I decided to make myself useful [something I had avoided all weekend by spending most of it sprawled on the couch, under a puff, watching hours of HGTV]. So I set up my ladder, draped some plastic, and finished painting the girl cave ceiling. As you may recall, I started painting the edges of it back in October… The color is a beautiful, rich dark purple called Galaxy by Benjamin Moore.
Last week I built, primed, and painted a cat platform and ramp for the dining room. A few days later I attached them to the dining room windowsill. But after a week of enticing [treats], encouraging [kind words], tough love [dropping on ramp and saying “up up up!”], I realized the cats [particularly Bonkers] were never going to use the ramp.
4 days ago I built a DIY spice rack with some trim wood I bought at our local hardware store. 3 days ago I primed it. Yesterday I painted it, and today it is DONE! It’s my birthday today [43!], so I decided I’d wait until today to hang it up, as a birthday gift to myself 🙂