It’s often considered a plus to be organized.  But being too organized can also be hazardous to your timelines and your mental health.  Although, if you’re already a couple of weeks into your reno, then chances are that your mental health has already been compromised. 

So, the advice that I wish to impart today is that at the end of a gruelling day when you’re tired and caffeine deprived, this is no time to be a hero and prep your work area for the next day with tools and supplies.  Nope, just turn around and head for the exit, if you can find it.  Trust me, by next morning, you won’t remember that you were an organizational genius the night before and you’ll wander around for half a day with a feeling of déjà vu looking for your stuff.  At some point, hopefully before real estate goes out of style, you’ll find all of the aforementioned stuff waiting for you in your designated work area as if someone had put it there on purpose.  You’ll spend the rest of the day trying to figure out how it got to be there.

Anyways, that’s the advice for today.  I have to keep this update short because I’ve spent the balance of the morning looking everywhere for a tube of caulking for the shower only to discover that the caulking was waiting for me in the bathroom all along. So, now I’m half a day behind schedule.  Plus after having taken a short break to write this update, I’ve misplaced the caulking again, so I better go and look for it.

I’ve often heard the expression “don’t paint yourself into a corner” but I’ve never understood where that expression came from.  Usually what you’re painting is walls, so unless you’re Spiderman and you climb walls, it would be pretty hard to go around a room painting the walls and end up stuck in a corner that you can’t get out of until the paint dries.

Maybe what they meant was “don’t grout yourself into a corner”.  This makes a bit more sense.  I’m not speaking from experience of course, but hypothetically speaking, someone new to grouting who’s really gung ho could end up in this situation.  On a side note, I just Googled ‘gung ho’ and it seems it’s a Chinese expression for ‘work together’ and ‘work in harmony’.   Seems like an oxymoron when applied to a rookie home renovator.  In any case when you’re grouting tiles it’s a good idea to start at one end of the room and move backwards towards a door or opening of some sort for an easy escape. A less desirable ending would be to end up in the middle of the room standing on one foot on a single tile and having to hop scotch your way to the doorway while holding a bucket of muddy grout water…especially if you don’t have window coverings yet and it’s after dark and the neighbours can see in.

The names of products in the home improvement business are descriptive and literal and we should embrace this. It’s not like skin care where something may be mysteriously referred to as age defying moisturizer and what that could really mean is anything from “this product will freeze time so that your cells don’t age while the rest of the world continues on” to “this stuff will feel like a greasy, sticky mess and attract all the bugs this side of Kansas”. No, it’s much more simple in home improvement.  So, the product “No More Nails” simply means that you don’t need to use nails anymore. There’s no creative twist where you should get the idea that it’s really putty in disguise or that they wanted to call it “No More Nail Holes” but ran out of room on the packaging. It’s simply “No More Nails” and it’s good stuff, if, for whatever reason, you opt not to use nails…like when your hammer walks away.

Why am I saying this?  Well, let’s just say there was a little misunderstanding.  Here’s what happened…and again, this is a true story. Not based on a true story, but it actually happened just like this.  We had painted two of the bedrooms, including the one that used to have wallpaper. Then we realized that we should have puttied some of the nail holes and other scrapes and dents.  This meant that we now had to putty over the paint.  This may seem a little backwards but it actually created an interesting polka dot concept with the white putty on the taupe paint.  We went around to inspect the artwork, to make sure that we got all of the holes this time.  The discovery was made that some of the nail holes were filled with gobs of a very tough glue like substance which seemed to be a different material than the other putty that we had used.  Puzzled, we continued on, stepping over crates of tools and supplies and I almost wiped out on a tube of stuff.  I picked it up and it was the tube of “No More Nails”. This was odd since we hadn’t done any construction in these rooms yet, only some demo and painting, so I enquired what this was used for.  The answer I got was “Oh yeah, I used that to fill in the nail holes because I thought it gets rid of both nails and nail holes”.

I’m not actually sure how the story ended because I haven’t revisited these rooms since. I know that they were painted though and I also know that the glue protruding from the nail holes was too tough to sand down. I’m getting a bad visual though of a light brown wall with all kinds of little brown lumpy growths on it.  Maybe the wallpaper would have been better.