Not the Kind of Girl Who … violates leases on a whim in the pursuit of custom-made furniture

NTKOG #10: The intrepid breed of Maker Of Things who quavers not at the thought of breaking down a perfectly good piece of furniture to repaint it, sand a few inches off of this and that, and otherwise risk time, $$$ and sanity to Frankenstein it into a perfect creation.

I am: fond of making things, modifying things, and generally customizing the world I’m forced to live in to fit a little more neatly with the (vastly superior) world I inhabit in my head. That said…

I am not: particularly handy or, when you get right down to it, great with my hands. Oh sure, I make stuff. But as with most of the physical things I lay hand to, everything looks like it was brilliant in thought and eh in execution. Just another unhappy symptom of my one-draft-wonder personality, I guess.

The Scene: is not a scene today, but a coffee table, and a bit of a sad one, at that. Cons: heinous shade of quasi-white, scuffed about the legs and chassis, just generally unpleasant, on the whole. Pros: very cheap, the perfect height and length for the loveseat, already in my third-floor apartment, where it was delivered by the two clear-skinned but dull-eyed lads who sold it to me. That’ll do, pig, that’ll do.

I scan through my mental rolodex of fun interior design concepts, and decide to paint the whole ugly mess with chalkboard paint, to create a fun, interactive centerpiece for the living room (which is also my bedroom, but we’ll leave that aside.) So I race on down to Dick Blick’s, which has apparently been rebranded as merely Blick, end up buying tons of absolutely unnecessary stuff that I absolutely needed, and one can of said chalkboard paint. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a normal can of it, but hey, I figured, picking up the spraypaint, there can’t be much difference in how it goes on, right?

Of course right.

Flash forward to my first night alone in my new apartment. After a killer job interview and many hours of moving, I’m too wired to sleep, yet too exhausted to lug a 50-pound coffee table down two floors of stairs to paint outside, so I lay down an extra shower curtain as a drop cloth in the middle of my living room floor and set up the coffee table for its coating. A little voice in my head whispers: “Take it outside! Don’t be The Kind of Girl Who gets kicked out of her apartment on the first day! TKOG who ruins a beautiful hardwood floor! TKOG who is … getting kind of high on paint fumes and has no more time for inner dialogue!”

Misgivings thus ethered, I lay on the first layer of paint on the surface of the table. Some issues with spatter spitting out of the nozzle, but they’re all caught by the drop cloth (or, less pleasingly, the table), which I check and double-check to confirm is not leaking through to the floor. After a bit of a break to custom-make some unbelievably flamboyance light-switch plates, I decide to toss on the second coat before I hit the ol’ air mattress and, just for bonus points, to paint the legs and sides of the table as well. This goes decently well and while there is still a little trouble with the spatter, the drop cloth extends at least two feet beyond all sides of the table and has no leaking issues, so hey, I figure, no harm done.

The Verdict: After I awaken from my long, fume-woozy sleep, I am like a tot on Christmas, absolutely staggering with anticipation to check out my new chalkboard table! It looks perfect: slate black, fairly evenly covered, and the little spatters marring the surface? Well, they look almost … decorational! Is what I have decided to believe anyway. I start setting up shop for the second coating of the sides and legs, then pause for a moment.

‘Huh, I know the old tenant didn’t do the world’s greatest job cleaning, but honestly, in daylight, this floor looks positively dingy. … Huh, why are the soles of my feet so dark? … Huh, is the floor a bit darker than–”

I don’t know where in the world is writ the record of sleepy, pajama-clad female moving a 50-pound coffee table, gathering up a shower curtain and positively fucking shrieking, but it would not surprise me were my name among the top candidates for fastest execution. In the floor of my living room: one regulation shower-sized patch of light tawny wooden flooring, surrounded by gradations of black.

Fuck, did I tell the landlord she could stop by to check out the oven this morning?

Fortunately, I discovered, a judiciously applied microfiber cloth, plain soap and water, and quite a bit of elbow grease seemed to clean the particles up. Unfortunately, there were roughly fourteen billion of the little fuckers swarming on every single horizontal surface of the room, and some vertical ones to boot. Plus, they were clinging to the bottoms of my feet, and would travel around to infect formerly clean areas. For four hours, I got on my hands and knees to scrub every inch of floor, wall, baseboard, light socket, you friggin’ name it, from the living room all the way to the kitchen.

On the bright side, my new coffee table is absolute aces. Couldn’t be happier with it. So this one, I guess, is ambivalent: customizing my own furniture? Definitely going to do again. But perhaps on a smaller scale, or at least a) taking way more precautions, and b) breathing slightly fewer toxic paint fumes.

Tagged as: bad judgement, coffee table, craftastrophe, decorating, furniture, i am dumb, interior design, mishap, new apartment, paint fumes, painting, spraypaint