Honey-Doings: Part IV

Wendy - Cast me a magic spell to make today a good one!

After all the setbacks of day two, I had high aspirations for day three. Wide awake, well awake anyway, I had my two cups of ambition while my daughter readied herself for work. Even a rocket scientist knows you can't paint a bathroom when someone has to take a shower, dry their hair, apply make-up, brush teeth, ad nauseum.

Although the application of the new wallpaper would be the final step in the restoration of "This Old Bathroom," I began my work by filling cracks and holes in the plaster wall with spackle. One spot, beneath the medicine cabinet, sported an abysmal hole that had been hidden by the old paper.

It was easy to imagine that behind that wall there might be a hidden stash of money. Perhaps someone long ago with a distrust for banks had used the cavity between the walls to keep their life savings secure. It was easy to imagine tearing down the wall for such a reward.

Imagining the mess, not to mention a very major set back to a Honey-Do project, I snapped back to reality. The dismay I felt while examining the hole in the wall, furrowed my brow as seen on my reflection in the mirror. A bump in the road was preferable to another setback.

Some pieces of wood from work bench tooled to size provided a solid surface onto which I was able to apply the spackling gunk. It took all of a half hour by the time I had smoothed the surface of my patch job.

Turning my attention to the window, I had missed a bump in the road but swerved right into a rather large pot hole. The window was in far worse shape than I had imagined. Yesterday I had scraped paint from the sills, moldings and sashes. Yes, I have the "old" windows, you know the ones with sash ropes tied to weights inside the window frame.

Through the etched frosted glass of the lower window, I was unable to see what the outside of the window looked like. It felt like nearly all the glazing, which holds the glass panes in place, was badly cracked and was falling off where my probing fingers touched. The Honey-Do list was apparently pregnant, for it had given birth to a window maintenance project! Normally, a birth is considered a miracle of the cycle of life, but this was one off-spring I had not wanted.

Opus was not the only one who wanted to run and hide! The window, both the top and the bottom, would have to be removed. For everything you want or don't want to know about repairing a window, you have to wait until the next chapter. Does this conjure up memories of those old cliff-hanger serials we used to see on those Saturday matinees at your town movie house?

Breathlessly waiting, you will be left in suspense pondering the fate of the hero, the answer to which will be forthcoming in Honey-Doings: Part V.

No.213