I was wrong. Oh, so wrong. The least rewarding part of DIY is nothing to do with painting. Even painting the bits people will never see is, in fact, rewarding on one level - because just for that moment when you paint that patch, you are seeing it, and you are rewarded. No, the least rewarding part of DIY has to be when you work on preparing a surface for paint. It's too awful. No one will ever see the surface unpainted. No one will ever appreciate what you've been through. Arguably, in a a few weeks, even you will forget the hours of miserable, thankless toil.
More alert readers may have guessed that today I prepared a surface for paint. The walls in my bedroom-elect are mouldy and I have to strip off all the paint and liner paper, treat the mould, seal the concrete and then paint on the topcoat. I thought it was going to be fairly easy - on Wall 1, the paper came off in huge strips big enough to wrap up a giant's fish and chips. I was feeling fairly upbeat until I started Wall 2, where the previous decorators had clearly and inexplicably used Superglue to affix the liner to the wall. I became deeply nostalgic for the huge strips - now the pieces of paper I was removing were around the size of a postage stamp. Suddenly the area to be stripped loomed very large.
On the upside, I had a fantastic time singing along to the whole of Starlight Express and the first act of Chess before I gave up. And now I'm off to see Sweeney Todd, so it could be worse. But really, if you're lucky enough to be landed with this task in future, hiring a steamer is probably wise. And for the record, professionally, if given the choice, I actually think I'd rather be the other kind of stripper.
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