Blame it on Pete

I spent the weekend home remodeling, okay, so I don’t even know if you can call it that, I, we, Pat (being the only nice person in all of SLC) and I spent all Saturday afternoon scrubbing each individual brick with wire brushes and rags and drinking beers. We like to believe that we completed 1/3 of the project, though I think that is a highly optimistic evaluation. Though to my credit because Pat doubted the whole project and doubted me, yeah he hasn’t learned yet to never doubt me, the cleaned part looks so incredibly cool that for a very short moment I wanted to have more exposed brick.

I’m a procrastinator or more like I have all these great ideas but when I actually start executing them they always require a lot more effort and time than in my plans. So when Pete was living with me he nicked one of the walls with his countless bikes. A rational person would have patched it up and it would have been perhaps a 2 hr project with paint matching. But I am not a rational person, not even close; I decided to tear all the plaster off the wall and to make it an even bigger project the adjacent wall, with a rubber mallet and a crow bar. All the exterior walls at my place have the potential to be exposed brick; the problem is it’s harder than you think. So when Julie and Zac were here, they helped finish taking off the plaster and carried the heavy buckets of concrete to the dumpster that was last March. To make it worse Julie and Zac didn’t have a choice in the matter, as they were staying in the guest bedroom and it was under construction, though they are good people too and I bet they would have helped if it wasn’t an eminent situation.

I talked to the people at Ace and they said that I would need to have lots of ventilation when I actually sealed the brick, okay fair enough a good excuse to put it off till the summer. But in the summer it was way to hot to do anything but take road trips to the Uintas. Last Friday I get an email from my friend Charlie, he lives in London. He and his girlfriend are booking flights to come ski the greatest snow on earth, they aren’t coming until the end of January, but once again everything takes longer than you think its going to. So I decided that I have to finish the spare bedroom. I was even thinking of going to Home Depot and hiring a Mexican or 2. Once Pat heard my brilliant idea, he decided to help thinking that its not the safest thought in the world, remember Elizabeth Smart, that was here.