Saturday, 7th April, 2007

False Economies

house painting

The very first thing I did to this house, 'shortly' after I moved in twelve years ago, was to strip the rather — but not totally — hideous wallpaper off of every single wall, and paint everything white.

There's a very particular 'theme' I have going on here — every single vertical surface is white, and every horizontal one (apart from most of the ceilings) is wooden. I know that some people think I should splash a bit of colour around the place, but I tend to rely on things like plants (and big red petticoats) to add non-monochrome interest, leaving the walls to act like a bare 'canvas'.

In my head, it's like they're great big blocks of solid plaster.

(Or something)

Anyways, it wasn't like I was skint at the time, but I made the (in hindsight) foolish decision to use tubs of 'Value' white emulsion to cover up the bare plaster and yellowy hundred-year-old original paintwork. I think I thought I was being all clever and 'trade-like' — perhaps even professional — about it, eschewing the fancy Dulux and Crown stuff — stuff that went on pink and changed to white, or stuff that promised "one coat" and all that.

This stuff didn't go on pink, it went on grey.

You have no idea how gutted I was the first time my roller hit the wall, and I realised that instead of making some kind of canny savings, I'd just wasted twenty quid on four massive pots of shite. I half-heartedly slapped a bit on the wall, and went off in a sulk.

When I came back an hour or so later, my mood was slightly bolstered to see that it had dried white-ish, but I still needed to give it a good three coats to get it to the blindingly brilliant white I'd imagined.

Took me bloody ages.

...

That was, like I said, twelve years ago. Since then I've painted this house probably about four or five times, upping the quality of paint each time. When you smoke as much as I do (and have a love of white walls) it gets harder and harder to cover up the nicotine stains, and right this second I'm using some Serious Bastard Hardcore Polyfilla Basecoat™ stuff for the really bad bits.

(It had occurred to me at one point, to put this house on the market described as having "Authentic Irish Pub Celings")

You never think though, that things you did over a decade ago are going to come back and grab you by the bollocks, but as you might have seen in my Flickr Photostream, I've been having a problem with flaking paint these past few days. What's happening is that somehow the moisture in this current layer is penetrating through the years, hitting the crappy layer from way back then, and causing it to come away from the wall. Leaving me with patches of bubbly and cracked paint that comes away from the wall at the slightest touch.

It's a bit gutting really. The stuff down the stairs was bad enough the other day, but yesterday the entirety of the massive stone plinth over the fireplace bubbled up in a sort of 'crackle-effect', and I was left peeling twelve years of paint off of it, and trying to blend new coats in so that they don't look too obvious.

And this morning, just lying here on the sofa, drinking coffee and trying to shake off the One Too Many Glass Of Wine™ from last night, I can see five more little areas that are going to demand an attack with sandpaper.

...

It's starting to feel like a bit of a Herculean task, this whole "sort the house out" thing. Sure, I've got the bedroom and the bathroom done, and — apart from these problem spots — the 'living room' is pretty sorted.

(Quick aside: I was dreading moving the sofa to paint behind it yesterday. The sofa is the usual 'sanctuary' for the wildlife that finds its way in gets brought in by the cats, and from the mountain of mouse-poo evidence that I've occasionally had to hoover up, I was expecting to find a good handful of carcases that would, presumably, stink. But there wasn't any — either they'd made a bid for freedom and got devoured by Tish, or they'd rotted right away¹)

But, third cup of coffee into the morning, I'm thinking about all the rest of the stuff I still have to do...

Despite it being a tiny little area, the bit under the stairs is going to be a hassle. The plaster-work on the underneath of the stairs itself is dodgy, and the wall is fairly patchy too. I'm expecting a fair bit of polyfilla and sanding before I can start slapping white emulsion around.

The kitchen isn't too hard — I've already filled-in the holes that were left after taking the old cabinets out, and all it needs is a bit of sanding and a coat of moisture-resistant paint.

But then, of course, there's the studio...

The studio is the room I spend the most time in. Apart from little trips to the kettle and the toilet, I do spend pretty much entire days in there. After lolling around on the sofa for an hour or so each morning reading emails and RSS feeds, I tend to encamp myself in my big black chair, and stare at my 22-inch² all day.

I work in there, I watch telly in there, I eat (sometimes) in there, I 'socialise' in there ... I even fall asleep pass out in there sometimes.

As a result, it's the room in the house that needs the most attention.

It's not just the accumulated smoke-related yellowing that needs covering up, because of the way I sit sometimes — with my legs up on the desk — there's also some grubby footprints on the walls that need sorting.

And, because of borked guttering a few years ago and rainwater streaming down the back of the house for far too long, I had a serious damp problem a while back, and big chunks of plaster fell off the wall.

AND, because some of the flashing around the chimney came off when we had those strong winds a few months ago, theres a bit of damp creeping in from the loft.

*sigh*

What I really need to do is rip out my beautiful hand-made desk, sort out all the boxes of Crap That I Might Need One Day™, patch up the plaster, treat the damp, and give the whole room several coats of white. Then bring the bed down from the loft and make the room into something that means I can write "two bedroom" on the estate agent forms.

...

But it's that thought that suddenly brings home the reality of the situation — that I'm not redecorating so that I have a nice place to live. I'm redecorating for someone else.

I think I've been deluding myself a little recently — or rather, maybe not having a true sense of the situation. I think, perhaps, there's been some kind of day-dream going on my head, along the lines of picturing people coming around here to view the place, and thinking "Ooh, what a beautiful home" — as if they're reviewing it for a magazine or it's some kind of 'house open day'.

"Roll up! Roll up! Come see the home of Transvestic Lancastrian Uber-blogger Siobhan Curran! Marvel at the Mission-Control-like wonders of her studio! Gawp at the empty wine bottle collection! Please do not feed the animals"

And each time I've finished a room, I've sat for hours just staring at it, chuffed with my handiwork and enjoying living in it.

I guess I'd not really thought all this through. I think I'd imagined that I could just continue through the next few months as normal — ploughing into the last term of the year and the inevitable 'bittiness' of it all, whilst in the background people came round, ooohed-and-aaahed at the house, and then someone would buy it and I'd go through all the emotions of extracting myself from a place that I love at some arbitrary point in August.

But if I'm going to sacrifice my studio-space and turn it into a bedroom, it's like I'm giving the house away now. It's like I'm turning into a lodger in my own home, not living here, but acting like some kind of 'caretaker' in it.

I'm changing the space away from somewhere that I live, into somewhere someone else might live. And I find that really difficult.

...

Suddenly though, another thought has hit me.

If I'm going to give up the studio, and turn it into a bedroom, where am I going to work?

What am I going to do with all the Macs? What about the network? What about this blog?

There's been a few times over the past couple of days — ever since I went offline — that I've thought of shifting all the sites and stuff that I host off of Erin and onto my external server. While I was in Cafe Nero on Wednesday I tried to su to root on it so that I could set up a temporary blog — but I forgot the root password.

It's incredibly important to me that I host this blog myself. I've written loads and loads of times about how integral it is to me that this is actually in my house, and that each HTTP GET that comes this way reaches its final destination — and is answered by — a blue and graphite box on the floor next to my feet.

I'm really proud of this weblog. It's not just some arbitrarily-located site that I put stuff onto from afar — it's an extension of me into a virtual space. I honestly (and excuse my immodesty here) believe it's pretty unique in that respect — the connection I have with it goes beyond anything else I've seen out there, and I don't think it would have developed into the same thing had I not hosted it myself.

In fact, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have even started it had it not been for a desire to see what I could do with this box hooked up to the net. All the stuff I've done online for the past five years has originated in some way from the code-tinkering on this blog.

All of it.

I mean, I knew I'd have a period of downtime during the actual move itself. I'd anticipated a week or so of disconnectivity while I sorted out a new broadband account, and a few days of hiccups while things like IP addresses sorted themselves out.

But this (ongoing) offline-ness that I find myself in, and the realisation that I can't really continue hosting with Erin while the house is on sale, makes me think that I might have to completely suspend my way of things for a lot longer.

Starting now.

...

I'm going into work on Wednesday next week. Despite the assumption of many that I get ridiculous amounts of holiday each year, I do actually go in when the students aren't there — if for no other reason than to get all the things done that I need to, but can't when they're about.

I'm hoping that my Xserve will have been plugged into the network so that I can set it up as the video-processing-and-uploading machine for our websites (that'll take some work...), and I've got shed-loads of stuff to catch up on based around some bids for funding me and Cubist have made recently.

But something occurs to me ... I don't know how easy it would be, considering that a lot of the stuff on this blog relies on Erin having PHP5, but I could shift everything onto my external Linux-box.

And maybe I could shift some of the physical stuff as well. I don't know what the others would think about it, and I'll have to run it past them, but I could take CuChulainn over there and set him up in my office, doing my main work on him and using Creidhne to shuttle stuff between here and there.

The only thing I think I'll have a problem with is email. Erin is (as I say over and over again) the mailserver for eyefood.co.uk, and I think considering how long it took me to set her up (and all the aliases and procmail stuff and things) that it would be a Task Too Big™ to try and switch everything over to the external.

So maybe I just temporarily shift the web-stuff over, and reconfigure my home network so that I leave Erin on and connected, but not in the same way as now.

...

Oh, I dunno. This is doing my head in.

I don't — as I've said before — like Change.

¹ Although if so, where were the bones?

² Fnaar fnaar.