paint chips to the eye ball

i am not especially handy. however, my girl J and i have taken on quite a project at the b&b where we work and live. we've already fixed all the cracks in the ceiling and painted it a shiny new white. this project took us a week of standing on rickety ladders with dry wall compound on our putty knives, trying to recreate the 'stubble' texture with wash rags. it actually turned out looking pretty damn good. the painting of the ceiling was not easy. the first round delivered quite a few paint globules to the forehead, down the shirt, and of course on the floor. the second round revealed all the spots that we had missed and took almost as long as the first round to smooth the edges and get the stubble fully covered.

since we did such a knockout job on the ceiling, i naturally started to think of myself as a home-repair master and figured it would be a good idea to strip all the paint of the window sills before painting them. these are old window sills; they are chipped and cracked and falling apart in some places. needless to say, the whole scraping paint thing turned out to be much harder than i'd bargained for. first i had to spray this wretched chemical goo all over the window sills which dissolved some of the paint as well as some of my cornea and most of the hair on my arms. did anyone know that scraping the paint is hard, physical work? to top it all off my poor aching muscles got all kinds of nails-on-chalkboard chills running the blade over the paint. and as i'm not the strongest or most skilled fritatta in the oven, the job looks a bit hacked. it's like the window sills were revolting against my good effort to clean them up and restore them to their former splendor. i'm hoping we can buff out the imperfections with the sander.

ugh! and we've still got so much work to do in such a short period of time. there's more patching, sanding, and painting to do. then we'll have to clean up the incredible mess we've made and try to put everything back in order. it better look fucking mahvelous when we're done.