1 December, 2000 - 2:08 PM

A million projects (or is that paint flecks?) dangling

I have so many unfinished projects. Right now, the one that's bugging me most is painting. There are a couple of things that go under the painting category.

First, there's the bathroom. The ceiling paint has been peeling in there since a month or two after we moved in. First it was just a little bit in the corners, but it spread and continues to do so to this day. I finally got tired of paint curling back and hanging down and started scraping. I was obsessed with it for a while, scraping at all hours of the day and night. When I suffered from insomnia, I was in the bathroom scraping at three in the morning. Paint flecks were a permanent, unnatural dandruff in my hair. Flecks lined the bathtub, covered the floor and were tracked all over the house. I tried to make them go in the trashcan as I scraped and tried to clean up after I stopped scraping, but they were everywhere. Unlike the ceiling they were supposed to stay on, they liked to stick to everything else once they were free.

I already knew part of the trouble with the ceiling paint in the bathroom. There is no vent in there. Considering the space is a cracker box posing as a bathroom, showers and even warm baths cause fog that would make London jealous. (Is London really that foggy? Is that just one of those myths that get blown way out of proportion by Sherlock Holmes mysteries and Jack the Ripper documentaries? Well, it sounded good.) You could steam sealed envelopes open in that room. And obviously, you could also steam paint right off the ceiling.

The other part of the problem, as I came to find out through scraping, was there were three layers of paint� in places. It seems someone got a little lazy when deciding to repaint the ceiling and only partially scraped off the second layer to put on the third without priming it. Maybe priming wouldn't have helped in the tropical conditions, but it seems logical to at least try it.

I also found black spots underneath the paint, which you can see in the third picture in the lower right if you squint a bit. Not only did the previous painter fail to prime, he or she also failed to get rid of the mold on the ceiling. Maybe it's because that mold is here to stay, because it would not come off after I scrubbed it and only came off a little when I scraped it to death. Now I'm having horrible thoughts of the bad black mold that causes all kinds of health problems and possible neurological disorders. I turned into crazy bleach woman for two days. The black spots are still there, and so is my paranoia.

What is gone is my obsession with scraping the ceiling. I still have a paint scraper in the basket on the back of the toilet, but it rarely gets used anymore. The ceiling has to start looking pretty bad and raining paint flecks before I'll climb up and do more scraping. It seems so hopeless. The paint comes off easily right after someone has showered, but then it sticks to everything. Only the dangling pieces come off if I scrape when the room is dry. The part of the room near the door only has a few areas of paint peeling back and is basically doing what paint is supposed to do� stay on.

Surprisingly, people have never commented on the crazy bathroom ceiling, but maybe they think I'm just following the shabby chic craze and made it look that way on purpose. I thought about putting the paint scraper inside the medicine cabinet and making a note that popped out if you opened the cabinet saying you had to scrape as penance for your nosiness. Of course, no one would do it because they wouldn't want to give away the fact that they were nosy. I could probably get a lot of my ceiling scraped if they did.

Maybe one day I will get around to completing my scraping project, installing a fan and repainting. Other projects seem more important right now, like the unfinished living room, which I'll talk about later in the unfinished paint project series.

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