When He Gets It Into His Head, Part I

My DH is usually an easygoing sort, to a fault sometimes. (But then my To Do lists are so long, I will never get it all done before I die. Not that I'm going to die soon, just that I have so many lists. I'm at the point that many items on my To Do list have their own To Do lists. I have Allie that thank for that.)

But this week, my typically laid-back DH has gotten it into his head that he must paint the molding along the floors, or, should I say, the tall molding along the stairs. Wherever it's not been scratched, dinged, scraped, scuffed or otherwise abraded by generations of Millers and friends, it's stained wood, almost a pecan color. And it must be painted. Forthwith! Post haste! Now! NOW.

There's just the teeniest problem. I work full time. Whaa...? Well, I am in charge of choosing the paint. You see, the walls in the main part of the house are three different shades of the same color, and there's not enough left of any one color to paint what needs painting. Nor is it semigloss, as it should be for trim paint. So he went to the paint store last week and brought home a handful of chip-strips. (Even though he had The Number of the original paint, I figured it would be discontinued by now, and I was right.) Taking his urgent lead, I set aside my finding-all-the-necessary-papers-to-file-our-tax-return project and began comparing the colors. But he stopped me, saying the taxes were more important and he wasn't going to paint until Friday (a snow day built in by the school district after our record-setting snowfall last year, only this year there's no snow, but there's still the snow day, lucky dog). Fine, taxes it would be. But I work full time. I leave the house by 7:30 and I'm home about 5:30 if I don't run any errands on the way home. At no time between now and Friday will I be home in the DAYLIGHT. DH isn't pleased, but I refuse to choose paint by lamplight, not when I'm going to have to live with it indefinitely.

And so I see a couple of refreshing opportunities here: Remove the #?@%* molding, since it really dates the house (laughing at myself, as if removing the molding will modernize a house that still has a pink bathtub), and just paint the wall behind it -- or -- repaint the whole area in something a little brighter and a little less butterscotch. But. Since he's already painted four rooms in the house since I moved in, I know option No. 2 is really not an option, and I doubt the wallboard behind the molding will be in good enough condition to paint (thus the molding in the first place), so I guess I will pick a color in the light of Saturday morning.