One Thing Leads to Another

You know how these home improvement projects work. A few years ago, our guest bathroom was gutted from joist to roof (literally) and entirely remodeled because D's mom had given us the gift of a low-flow toilet.

And now that we have moved the old fish tank away from the livingroom wall in preparation for putting the new fish tank in its place, it seems that this is the opportunity we've been waiting for to repaint. Yup. You can only hold yourself back from brightening things up for so long, and apparently, 11 and a half-years is our personal limit.

So last night, even though I said I was going to bed, D. and I ended up staring at the empty corner where the old tank had been, and we realized the Golden Opportunity to turn an already complex and time-consuming project into a Neverending Project From Hell was stretched out before us like a box of upturned carpet tacks at a barefoot belly-dancing party.

And because we are such careful, plan-ahead Virgo types, we figured it would be a good idea to just sort of dash up to Home Depot tonight, after work and gymnastics and dinner, to grab a few gallons of a yet-to-be-decided-upon color and dang-it-all, start that project NOW so that we could finish it tomorrow and have it dry enough Sunday to move the new tank into the room.

The new tank, still in our garage, has 410 gallons of water in it. It has passed the pressure test. Tomorrow, we drain the thing into the neighbor's pool, a plan that was okay'd by the wife five minutes after being nixed by the husband. The upside is that the water doesn't go to waste. The downside is that the husband may end up blaming us for creating friction in any otherwise apparently functional marriage. We are such homewreckers.

Of course, there are minor glitches in every plan. For example, it wasn't until we were all walking out the door to go to Home Depot that we realized that it was 8:40 and the place closes at 9:00 on a Friday and it takes 30 minutes to get there. Math may not be my forte, but even I could see this was problematic.

And, yeah, D still has to make his custom dolly to move the 400 pounds (when empty) tank, and we need to mud part of the wall that was flaky. That kind of thing.

I assure you that it's only the wall that's flaky, not us. Oh, no. We're on it. We're sharp as the proverbial carpet tack.



Here are the fishies that started it all. The Coke can is for size comparison only but the perspective doesn't do the critters justice in spite of that: Lao Tsu, the big fish, is 17" long.