[ progress report ]
We put on the first coat in the family room on Saturday. We made a lot of mistakes along the way, which we hope not to repeat in the rest of the house. Something we will definitely start doing from now is taping the ceiling, because at this stage we'll have to do a lot of touching up to get rid of the blobs of color stuck on the white ceiling.
On Sunday we had a shock: the paint job looked awful! Very uneven color and coverage despite the promise on the paint can of one coat coverage, and the areas where I had patched holes with spackling looked very weird on the orange peel surface. (By the way, have I mentioned yet that I hate hate hate hate textured walls?)
Very dejectedly we painted a second coat (after spraying texture on the patches), this time trying extra hard to maintain thick and even coverage. Another wall that was to be painted the same color turned out the same after the first coat there, despite our improved process. It seems that we will have to do two coats everywhere.
The good news, looking at the dried second coat on Monday (admittedly under artificial light) is that it looks very good, with even coverage. Now I have courage to continue painting the rest of the rooms we decided to paint, although our estimate of the time required has drastically increased.
::
[ trick or treat ]
This was Angel Face's first Halloween. Yes, she is four, but she has spent her first three Octobers in South Africa.
On Friday she got dressed in her princess outfit (nothing else would do) and came trick-or-treating here in the lab. We went all out here, with more than 30 candy stations in our building alone, and probably close to a hundred across the site. We had games in the kids activity room, loads of decorations, and quite a few people in costume.
She had a blast!
Then on Sunday evening she was dressed up in ghagra choli, with a fancy bindi and the dupatta jauntily knotted behind her back for a quick, shivering round of trick-or-treating around the apartment complex.
All in all, a rousing success for her first time :-)
And now there is some incentive to take naps: only one candy a day, and that only after a nap!
