Mom was right: I did get much faster with the rag-on technique. Well, not much faster. Just faster. I started work at 5 p.m., and covered the entire room by 8:30 p.m.
Anyway, except for the closets and the trim, the bedroom is done. But that’s not the interesting bit. When I pulled the blue painter’s tape…
You see, there’s this one odd wall in the bedroom: it’s incredibly smooth, and is obviously built out on top of the original wall. That doesn’t describe it very well, but I’m not sure how else to express it. Anyway, my agent, Angie, thought that the underlying wall was so badly cracked and damaged that some prior owner had simply put drywall on top of it rather than repair it.
But as I pulled off the blue painter’s tape along the trim at the bottom, a tiny sliver of new paint came off, too, revealing a very dark, denim-like blue underneath. At least, it was denim blue until I pulled away and examined it in close detail. Then, that tiny sliver looked like a blue eye. My blue eye. The entire wall is a mirror, and some previous owner, instead of removing this icon of the pre-AIDS era, simply painted over it.
I can only imagine how this discovery would have turned out if I had tried to drive a nail into that wall to hang a picture