Tuesday, October 28, 2014

The pink bed of doom

In case you were wondering whether all my crafts turn out, the answer is no. No, they really don't.

I have had a twin-size headboard, footboard, and whatnots clogging up my kitchen passage for about a month, waiting for a non-rainy interlude. A friend found them for me free, and they were fine (especially because they have snazzy twist-off knobs on top! so cool!) but they would be MUCH COOLER in hot pink for Meg. Obviously. So I bought a can of spray primer and another of paint and seized the weekend, which was warm and sunny.

While we do have a lovely huge backyard, it is also quite grassy, so the dropcloth didn't lie flat. It bunched up and flopped around in the wind, strategic rocks and all, and stuck to the painted bed parts. It made weird wrinkles. It also, charmingly, flung layers of white primer back on top of the pink, and they stuck there and couldn't even be sanded off with the sandpaper I have.

I didn't get enough primer or paint the first time, not having painted a bed before, so I wasted a day and a half chasing after more paint of the same color, which is apparently only sold at Wal-Mart in Winchester and not at True Value, Lowes, Target, or Wal-Mart in Leesburg. I wasn't going to Wal-Mart in Winchester because it's 25 minutes away the wrong direction, although in hindsight I could have. I hadn't expected that color would be so rare. I finally got a slightly different pink paint at Wal-Mart in Leesburg, because by then I didn't care, and I got three cans.

Well, the new paint was awful. It dripped and spurted and made blobs. It actually failed to adhere to the primer, in some places, and went scattered and shattered-looking. I'd have done far better to buy a bucket of paint and use a brush. Or, plan of plans, I could have assembled it unpainted and let Meg have a brown bed. I am never buying Krylon spray paint again.

The now wrinkled, shattered-looking, blobby, and smudged pink bed is drying out back. Tomorrow we will bring it in, hopefully before the rains start, and we will assemble it and let Meg have her pink bed. Because not all projects are wins, but a home is still worth making. So there.

Also, the bed has spinny knobs on top that twist off. I don't think she'll mind paint blobs.

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