Behind the Blue Door

You know how home-improvement project start out manageable and amoeba out from there? Yeah. It was like that.

To set the scene, I've done several large science editing projects over the past month or so (my side job), and Arizona, bless him, said, "You've been working your butt off. You should get yourself a present." 

Having just bought myself a couple of pretty mountain biking shirts, and being okay in the clothing and computer department, I said, "How about we replace the front door?" (Our living room doesn't have a ton of natural light, so I want to replace the solid door with something brighter.)

So off we traipsed to the store ... only to discover that they strongly recommend not just replacing the door itself, but doing the whole rip-out-reframe thing, which was *way* more than we had in mind. Sigh. "Okay," I said. "Let's get some paint. If I can't replace it, at least I can make it less ugly. Right?" 

In the paint aisle, we considered going with green, just so the directions to our house can include "behind the green door" (because both of our humor levels tend towards "sixteen year old boy," yanno--Google at your own risk), but settled on a pretty blue. Then, since we've have "redo the locks" on the list since we moved in over a year ago, we headed for the lock aisle. Ninety minutes and three stores later, we've got what we want.

Now, remember, my present to myself was going to be sticking a pretty new door right where the old one used to be. Oh, and there was supposed to be more light involved. But painting can be fun, too. At least that was what I kept telling myself.

Imagine, if you will, three entry doors in a pretty tan house with white trim. Got it? Now slap a layer of eggplant-hued latex paint on them (probably from the "Oops" rack of five-dollar specials), and wait a year for it to start bubbling and flaking off. Yeah. Leprous eggplant doors. I has them. I also had the vague idea that since a quarter or so of the paint was already falling off, it would be simple to remove the rest.

Er. Not so much. Turned out the stuff that's stuck on was really *stuck*, and my sander wasn't smoothing it down the way I wanted. 

Okay, off to store number four, where we bought two different kinds of stripper and discussed stopping at the local gentleman's club on the way home to see if any of the ladies would like to help us out, so we'd have strippers doing our stripping (see above, re: sixteen year old boys). And then it was back home for several hours worth of manual labor, whereupon I (having not eaten since breakfast) started feeling very sorry for myself because this was supposed to be a *reward*, darn it, not more work!

Arizona wisely took me out for sushi and a big glass of wine at this point.

The upshot? I currently a pristinely stripped door downstairs wearing one layer of blue, some white trim and beautifully caulked edges. Did I mention that this isn't even the front door? I started with one of the other doors. But that's okay because I think I have a lead on a replacement front door that's all wood, so we can trim it to fit the existing jamb (and then sand, paint, etc.). 

I'm betting it'll be two, maybe three weeks and forty-some man hours before all three doors are pretty and blue. All because my hubby is a sweetheart and told me I should buy myself a present.

(Let's see if he ever does that again!)

So that's the story of my weekend, and the project that Got Out Of Hand. What do you guys say? Have you been overtaken recently by a project that should have been simple?