For the past week, we've been working on getting our attic finished to make it a somewhat livable space. At present my dad is putting up drywall, and thus far I have managed to evade any part whatsoever in this project. But alas, all good things must come to an end.

This morning I awoke at 10:45 to be confronted with the arduous task of restoring our old attic windows to their supposed previous grandeur. (These two windows, if I may say, are already beyond any kind of profitable restoration, but thankfully they will be so high up that no one will really notice.) So my dad and I lugged the windows to the back yard, where I would be scraping paint, filling in cracks and then re-painting the frames. At first I didn't think much of it; it all seemed simple enough to me. Scrape, fill, paint.

But what I didn't bet on was the impressive stamina of 90-year-old exterior enamel paint. In short, my dinky scraper was no match for the paint that was probably, by now, atomically fused with the wooden window frames.

So I resolved to leave the sections that were impossible to remove, as painting over them probably wouldn't do any harm. Unfortunately, by this time I had inadvertently scraped off a great deal of the putty keeping the windows in place in the frames. My dad fetched me some putty, and I immediately realized that my devil-may-care approach had been my demise.

For those who have never experienced this, it must be established that painter's putty is evil. I'm convinced that the purging of evil in Deuteronomy 19 is actually a reference to painter's putty. It will stick to anything and everything except what you actually want it to stick to, as though it is mocking your futile attempts at forcing it into submission.

After about 45 minutes of scraping, filling, puttying, and flinging said putty in abject surrender, I decided on a break so that I could have lunch and then recount these events on here. I'll most likely be returning for a second round (and perhaps a third), so updates will be posted as needed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.