My Ceiling: Room Redo Part 3

In a way I am sorry that I don't have a picture of what my ceiling used to look like. Just never thought it was necessary to take a picture of ugly with a capital U. Let me try and describe the amount of ugliness.

It had holes where swag lamp hooks once were, there were these large dimples, the size of monster clam holes, okay the size of quarters and half dollar pieces, they were sprinkled all over the ceiling, except in the area where you could see the outline of a four by four sheet of plywood right around the light fixture. Speaking of right around the light fixture, which was one of those lovely square glass numbers from the early sixties, the paint and fine (as in thin, not lovely) coating of texture was brown and peeling from the heat of the light bulbs. Maybe or maybe not, it could have been because in my desperation to see in a nearly windowless room I had put hundred watt-ers in, maybe.

Dirt and I had begun debating about the ceiling right away in the redo process, once we realized that it was going to be more than getting a new mattress and painting the walls. After I did the plaster on the walls I knew I was not up for a Sistine Chapel thing on the ceiling and was wanting something lovely, totally covering all the bizarreness and not all that difficult. What we found, nearly by accident, because I found it the day we were debating closet guts, was in my opinion nearly a perfect thing. Paintable wall paper.

It is supposed to look like pressed tin squares. Whether it does or not is beside the point for me really, it just makes the ceiling look lovely.

It was relatively easy to put up with all four of us working. We ended up working in the dark because, well because, this time of year it gets dark soon so if you really want to use the hours in your day, you will end up doing somethings in the dark.

Mr. Vick, aka Dirt, had assured me that the room was square, he had just put in the floating floor from Ikea (cheap but clean and lovely) and sure enough you could see that the floor was indeed very square, very surprising for this old farm house I might add. I am convinced that the folks, each different set, that built this house did so without a tape measure, square or level, like the kid who builds a tree house without using any of dad's power tools after the first day.

I should have snapped a plumb line, it would have only taken me a minute and would have shown that the top of the wall bowed in in the middle considerably, making the lines, and there are plenty of lines in the paintable wall paper, slightly off in some places and "would you please not stare at the ceiling" off in others.

Then came the debate over color. Yes, I so love color and I am so driven batty by large expanses of white that even the idea of white on a ceiling causes me to melt. Dirt being the color minimalist that he is, cannot understand why I don't just go white, especially on the ceiling. Well because, for one when white is in a shadow it is actually grey, when color is in a shadow it is just that color only with a shadow. We have plenty of shadow days in the Pacific Northwest and our fair share of grey.

My brain in fact is full of grey. It needs, needs I exclaim, color. And for number two, white is the color my canvas is before I put myself on it (yes folks, I used to be a budding artist, back in my hippy childhood days, the only classes I took my senior year were art classes including art assistant, four blissful hours of various art, I even toyed with majoring in art in college, until I spoke to my dad that is). In my world, white begs for something to be done and I have enough work screaming at me from all corners of my life without a bunch of "canvases" screaming at me that aren't really in need of anything because someone has painted them already, just painted them white.

So there you have it folks, welcome once again to inside my head, isn't it fun in there? I did notice that my skin was looking a tad jaundice and sickly with all the green so I knew I wanted to warm it up a bit. My ceiling in the dining room is a lovely mango so when the idea of using the metallic paint, "warm silver" was tossed out on its ear, I decided to go "pink".

I took one of my whiter mis-mix paints, dribbled a little of our trim paint in it, swirled it up and rollered it on. And I love it. It looks like the sky at sunset or early morning light coming across our wonderful mountain, all pink and glowing promises of a fantastic day.

After cruising the home interiors catalogs on-line with Dirt and the poor school teacher actually toying with the idea of spending over a hundred bucks on a mini chandelier, I found myself at Ikea picking up their lovely thirty-nine dollar special. Of course the European cover for the electrical outlet did not fit so Dirt picked up a "ceiling canopy" at Home Depot for about fifteen bucks, unfortunately he didn't find a solid black one and on the phone his idea of color isn't mine. I used the sample of warm silver metallic paint that I picked up for the ceiling to take the black down a bit and maybe later I will try to do a better job matching the canopy, the curtain rods and the light fixture, but for now it works.

In the two days that Dirt and I spent looking and contemplating mini-chandeliers on-line I came to find out that Dirt is a shiny bauble sort of guy, who knew, and all this new information after twenty-nine years of marriage, huh. So because I didn't care for IKEA's version of shiny baubles and went with the plain one instead, part of what I will be doing today to put the finishing touches on my room is putting baubles on my light fixture.

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I had really wanted colored light shades but alas could not rationalize spending twenty bucks times five for just the perfect shade. Painting them turned out awful so I will keep the extra that I bought to cover my experiment, and see if attaching a few baubles to the shades help, if not off they come and I will just put the beads on wires draped on the fixture itself.

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So that was my plan for the day, 'cept Dirt took my car to work and in it was the bag of extra baubles from Michael's Craft Supply.

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Has anyone else noticed that the stores have less stuff in them than usual? The girls and I stopped in a Michael's down in a little town south of here on Thanksgiving weekend and I was surprised by the limited supply and selection of trimmings over last year. It seemed like they didn't even have the amount at the beginning of the season that they had a week after Christmas last year when we went to get stuff for this year (a favorite thing of mine to do and because we celebrate into the middle of January I put my new finds out right away and enjoy them for the current year and the next).

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Any way, I thought the limited selection was because of the location of the store, so yesterday when Dirt took me to the Michael's on South Hill, I was again surprised by the limited supply and selection and the lack of crammed-ness feeling in the store. I have also noticed it in other stores, a nursery/cutesy shop here in our little town again seems to have the amount of stuff at the beginning of the season that it has had in the past for the "after all is said and done" sale.

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I'm thinking the "bad economy" is finally starting to take its toll on the merchants that never seem to be affected. When the economy alarm is sounded, like it was with a vengeance last year, it is always hard to grasp, sorta like "global warming", because the wheels of commerce seem to grind merrily a long and people are seen still purchasing large quantities of worthless stuff and the garbage trucks never stop running down 304th street.

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I haven't been in the stores enough lately, bed rest and all, to notice the amount of worthless-things-purchasing going on. It always seemed in the past, that folks just let the good ol plastic absorb their financial short comings. And of course it is always hard to believe the cries of commerce woe sounded by the news media the week before Thanksgiving and then again toward the end of the Christmas shopping season, come on we all know that is a set up, who owns the media, who owns the stores, really now. But maybe, just maybe, this year we really are in a recession or some sort of economic woe as a whole country, except I'm not really hearing much said about it as I am seeing evidence in the shops. That is a switch.

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Don't get me wrong, I am well aware of the economics of regular folks and that some folk are really in a bind and have been for a while. It is just that, in the past, economic woes, as reported or felt, never seem to be reflected in the market place in spite of the horror that the media portrays. And this fall with the nonsense I heard going on in local churches and Kamp Krusty's reporting similar ridiculousness across the nation, who would have guessed that we were in the middle of hard economic times.

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After all when a smallish church (200 or so) can kick in ten thousand bucks to the denomination's consultant to the region for what ails their church and then add to that the hiring of a fella to the tune of thirty-thousand to increase their numbers and up their tithing (yes, we know the joke) then clearly there is no one out of work in those congregations. When churches have leadership luncheons catered to the tune of thirty bucks a plate for a couple of sandwiches, then obviously if you are experiencing financial woes, you are doing so alone I say.

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But I have heard that our President is encouraging folks to spend money, along with encouraging mothers to abandon their children and go back to school, so maybe our churches are just doing their level best to help shoulder the burden of the economy and spend money on dumb stuff. Then again maybe they just have a screwed up idea of what church is supposed to be. Oh wait, I forgot that verse where Paul tells Peter that church is just big business.

Okay I'm done ranting, how did I even get here, oh yeah, stuff in the stores, but enough of that, I actually have some reading material to enjoy along with doing up the bead work that Dirt brought back home in my car he stole today.

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Speaking of things being delivered, today our mail was delivered practically in our bathroom. Our mail carrier drove her jeep down to our house so that she could use our potty, apparently the store on her route where she usually stops was having water trouble today. Yikes. Talk about unexpected company and in my bathroom no less!

So this is my current reading material. And I am so looking forward to it.

Because the one book, EcoFarming, has pages that look like this...

...and this. Exciting stuff I tell ya. All part of Dirt's and my journey to becoming real farmers and preparing for him to eventually stop teaching and work just from here.
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What a concept, a time when my husband will just have one job! Ever since I've known Dirt he has always had more than one thing that he does to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. But that is a whole big post on work ethic and men taking care of their families and getting things done.
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The other book is a reprint and part of it was run years ago in a magazine I use to get, Small Farmer's Journal out of Oregon, it focuses on farming using horses instead of tractors. This all kind of brings up a huge conflict for me, I am very much into the environment, always have been, when I wasn't contemplating majoring in art I was majoring in Forestry. I wore hiking boots and carried a back pack before they were standard issue, well the days I wasn't wearing a sizzler and wood platform shoes anyway. But this new trend of green this and green that and sustainable nose picking, for crying out loud, it is all just a bit batty driving.

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It makes me want to spray chemicals just to be contrary. I have a few friends that do real farming and the fact that they don't get paid their due for good honestly produced food but some whacked out store can saran wrap two eggs call them organic and sustainably farmed, then charge the same amount as for a dozen eggs, it drives me. What the heck and how freaking gullible is America anyway? Please people, eat some protein so you can think.

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So as much as it would behove us to market how green and simple we are, we won't. It fries me. Farmers have always been "green" yes, there have been times of corporate greed and careless activity, when there is money involved there is always that potential, Actually read the history books and its the college boys with their fixes for the uneducated dirt farmer that have screwed things up and got us into messes. For the most part the first guy that cares about the environment is the fellow who lives by it. Screw it up and your done, out of business. Not to mention not too many people work like farmers do, no guaranteed time off, no weekends at the beach, and then trash the very place they work in, live in.

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Quit squawkin about the price of food on your table, compared to everything else, as long as you're not falling for that "organic" hoax, the price of food is ridiculously cheap. And you can bet your boots the farmer man sitting on the tractor or busting ice isn't getting the hog's share of any increases you saw lately. That, as usual, goes to the huckster that plants himself between the real producer and the ever gullible consumer, convincing the consumer that his services of interference are needed. What a load of dung. Oh if only someone could figure up a food insurance policy, now there would be some money makin' ventures without having to get your hands dirty, just your soul and who cares any more how dirty that is.

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Wow, what is that two nearly unrelated rants, a couple of hinted at ones and some smashed little toes in one post that started out about my new ceiling. Time to put down the lap top and do some bead work or knitting eh?

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Well you have a good evening Dear Reader, hope I didn't spoil your dinner of organic milk and heirloom sustainable broccoli that you paid four bucks a pound for.