Still Painting: or, Why I Now Hate Ladybugs

So we've been making progress on the house, though we haven't been recording it very well because on days when we paint - we paint from sunup until it's too dark to see. Fun times, I tell you.

This is the corner of my studio ceiling, as seen from Alan's office. The sign that says "make" is an extra support beam that the inspector (whom we have grown to hate) made the builder add after he was done with everything. We thought about ripping it out after we get our Certificate of Occupancy but then we decided to jazz them up a bit and make them a feature. I must say I quite like it. I'm always a fan of words and signs so this makes me very happy. Wait until you see what we (someday) do to our stairs. Big plans. . .

I'm also happy with the paint job to the ceiling. It's been some of the most nightmarish painting I've ever done, but I really like the clean look of the white with gray beams. It shows up the lovely lines of the beams without it being too contrasty and screaming, "Hey! Look at these exposed beams!"

But we're not done - oh no! My studio was the worst, because the ceiling height ranged from about 18 to 25 feet and I really don't like heights anymore. But now we're in the home stretch. Whew! The scaffolding is lower, but the room is bigger. And there has been an Invasion of Ladybugs.

See those little dark clumps in the corners of the beams? Those are ladybugs (actually Asian Lady Beetles if you want to get all technical) and they think they're going to hibernate in our bedroom. This is them in the morning when it was still chilly and they were all calm. I don't want to get into horrible detail here, but my the afternoon there were thousands of them flying through the room I was trying to paint. I had to brush them off each section before I could paint it. They were crawling all over me - in my ears, inside my glasses, down the back of my neck. Alan (under deadline and hard at work) came out to see if I was ok after he heard me screaming things like, "Get the f*** off me you little bastards!" It wasn't quite as bad as the day Alan's foul language echoed throughout our valley (and forever scarred the sheltered homeschooled kids innocently playing in their yard while we worked) but it was close.

At the end of the day I took this picture from the porch off our new master bedroom to remind myself that this will all be worth it when (if) we move in.