Well, it has come to this. I would be, finally, painting floors this afternoon, but I find I have no floor paint. The lid appeared to be solidly on but when I pryed it up the paint was a solid.
My hands are scratched, scraped and bruised. I’ve repaired my gourds that needed repair, gluing and drilling and sewing back together. I’ve repotted cactus. Yesterday, armed with a new ladder that doesn’t put my life in peril, I repainted the windows and doorways in the back room which is used mainly for storage. Those windows, I don’t believe, have been painted in 40 years at least. Scraping off the old paint would have meant removing the wood. So they, like everything else around here, have a decided stucco effect to them–though the windows in the other rooms of the apartment are in better shape. In the summer a tree attempts to grow through the floor back where is a pipe of some sort that is now capped off. And higher up on the wall nearby there is a pie plate looking (would be covering a hole) that I’ve only seen in kitchens, in other old places we’ve lived in, where there was once a ver old stove/oven. A coal appliance? So maybe very early on that portion of the apartment was the kitchen instead.. The landlord has always referred to it being an old sunroom, but its obvious the kitchen was never in the interior of the apartment and equally obvious where it is now was not built with kitchen use in mind.
I tried but was unable to remove the blinds in one of the windows and as I didn’t want to break them and thus have to purchase another set I simply painted around them. Slipshod, I know, but the windows being the condition they’re in, I don’t think it much matters. Seeing the landlord at one point, while painting, I pulled him in to look at something. He noticed I was painting and said if I wanted it I could have some work painting other apartments. I declined.
I’m not used to working with an honest-to-god ladder. And it is nice to have. I managed not to drip a single drop or smear the windowpanes with paint. Which was one of those little nothings that one counts as a sort of accomplishment. Then after several hours of painting, after taking a break to drink some water, when I went back in to finish the job, not being used to working with an honest-to-god ladder, I forgot that I had put the paint bucket on that portion of the ladder that is used for holding paint buckets, and I moved the ladder and next thing I knew there was paint all over me and pouring down the ladder to the floor. So much for that slim accomplishment.
Would make sense that what is our back storage room was once the kitchen. There are no picture mouldings at the ceiling and the door frames in there don’t have detail. Also the windows, though large, begin a good 4 inches higher than the others in the apartment and, as there are no ceiling mouldings, go all the way to the ceiling. Maybe what is now our kitchen, which I’ve always figured was once the back entrance storage area, was also once a pantry for the kitchen. As far as I can tell it has not ever had an ordinary door leading into the apartment. The door (no longer there, but a portion of its hardware remains) used to instead be either a swinging door or a folding door. Perhaps a swinging door.
Where the stove/oven originally was located, smoke from it wouldn’t have come pouring back into the apartment, as it now does.
H.o.p. comes up and asks me to read to him only the last sentence of what I’ve written.
“Perhaps a swinging door,” I say.
“Oh, that sounds mysterious,” he replies.
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