The Benefits Of OCD

Perhaps you remember our bathroom project...the one that has resulted in the boys' bathroom being out of order, thus necessitating that I share MY bathroom. For a month.

Yeah, that one.

Sharing a bathroom with boys is....disgusting. Before we undertook the renovation, I stopped cleaning their bathroom, naievely reasoning that if it got bad enough, they would clean it themselves.

Perhaps predictably, their bathroom became a certifiable biohazard.

Still, I refused to clean it.

You know why? Because *I* do not piss on the floor. Or the walls. Or in the wastebasket to the left of the toilet.

Nor do I spit toothpaste into the sink and neglect to wash it down, thus creating a particularly strong molecular bond that requires a chisel to remove. And I don't find it particularly amusing to spatter the mirror with interesting, but occlusive streams of oral hygeine by-product.

So, I found it patently unfair that *I* should be charged with removing these substances from surfaces that I had scrubbed to a blinding polish only days before.

But since they are sharing my bathroom, I have no choice if I want to maintain status sanitarius.

It's been a long, stinky month.

We have been waiting on the contractor to replace the subfloor. Apparently, contractors can bend the properties of time and space. Two weeks never means two weeks. Sometimes it means four. And a couple of hours, might just mean 8.

At long last, however, the new subfloor has been installed.

Do you hear angels singing? Arias? Harp music?

I sure as shit did. I've never been so excited about particleboard in my whole freakin life.

So this past weekend, we put up the wallcovering and the chair rail.

Here's where the OCD part comes in.

We are decorating the bathroom in a beach-y, cottage-y, nautical-y motif. I found this awesome chair rail mumbelty mumble years ago for this express purpose, and it has been waiting patiently in the dusty recesses of my garage all this time. This chair rail has a small rope detail at the bottom, and I thought it would be too too perfect with our theme.

And it is. It looks really nice.

But I thought, in order to make it really stand out, I would paint it white, and the two strips of wood above and below it, tan, which is the color of the walls above the chair rail.

Whattamifrigginnuts?

I spent two days on this detail. With an eyeliner brush.

First I did the tan. But I slopped too much on the white. So I went back with the white to erase all the tan. And then I slopped some white on the tan. So I went back with the tan. Lather, rinse, repeat until vision is blurred.

I became obsessed with getting this stupid trim perfect.

I'm not really OCD, but I am a perfectionist, and it was driving me crazy to have it looking sloppy. I still think it looks sloppy. But I had to walk away before the rope detail was completely obliterated under 17 layers of paint.

And the worst part? I don't even know if it's visible enough to make the kind of impact I had hoped it would. I don't even know if it's worth all the freakin time I spent on it.

I'll give you full before and afters when it's all done, but for now, behold:

(and just so you know, now that I see this picture, I see spots that need to be touched up. Again.)



A little wider shot for comparison:



(No, it's not your imagination. The wall is bowed. Badly. It was fun hanging that chair rail.)

Floor goes down this weekend. Then the toilet goes back on. The rest is just detail work. And then we are home free baby. No more peedle puddles on my toilet seat. No more giant bars of soap sludge in my shower drain. No more skid-marked underwear littering my bathroom floor.

Almost there. Almost there. Almost there. Almost there. Almost there. Almost there.

Almost. There.

Almost.

There.