ORC 5b: Lesson Learned

I had really thought this time would be different.

Because we started a couple of weeks ahead of the "official" start of the ORC, I thought that the powder room project would be done by now. The last thing I expected is to be scrambling to finish on time.

The day ORC 5: What, Already? was posted, I jumped into my car after work and drove quickly to my Mom's. We ran to a moulding store to see if they had anything to top our tile. It was fifteen minutes before close, though, so we didn't exactly have time to browse. We left empty handed.

In a frantic effort to keep things moving along, I decided to start painting the upper wall.

I didn't stop to check the condition of the walls. In a couple of spots, I thought, hmm, I should sand this down. But I didn't stop to sand. I just kept going. I was using Marquee, a paint which promises one coat coverage, so I knew that when I was done, I would be done.

I wanted to be done.

So I kept going...and ran out of paint at about 9:20pm. I decided I would buy another can in the morning and finish up then.

The next day, I walked into the bathroom with my fresh can already open and ready to pour,

--and died.

The walls were awful. Horrible. The paint had flashed all over our patches--and there were patches everywhere. The little dribs and drabs I hadn't bothered to sand were glinting. Mocking me.

I have never had a project with so many setbacks. Not even the dressing room was this bad. It's a small project, really. Install tile, a window treatment, and paint. Put up a few pictures, a towel bar, mirror, and a light fixture. How can that possibly take eight weeks?

I had thought the project well in hand when I decided to make this an ORC project. I'd just blog what we did as we went along. But, I lost a week because of work, and then the drywall repair took a while and then the cutting of the trim and baseboards turned out to be horribly complicated and the fetching of the artwork cost us a day (which was a total of 25% of our available working time that week) and so on and so on.

And then, I took a short cut which cost us even more time.

I took another run to home depot and bought the proper grit of sandpaper to sand down our patches. I repatched in some places. And then we primed, as we should have done all along.

I am not sure I will ever do an ORC again. The deadline takes what is normally a fun and exciting thing to do and turns it into a gruelling, and exhausting chore. There are upsides, too, though, so we'll see.

But no more shortcuts.

Lesson learned.

ORC 1: Going Insane Again
ORC 2: Hall of Mirrors 
ORC 3: Seven Steps to Stress
ORC 4: The Roller Coaster

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