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March 09, 2007
Painting Preparations
Furniture with Plastic
We're expecting a guest at the end of April, and I have reached the conclusion that I must stop procrastinating in regard to setting up the guest room. The first step was to clean it out. Shawn had cleaned the apartment for another event we had, which meant the guest room got loaded up with boxes, old magazines and extra ketchup bottles and cans of beans.
Next is painting. I went out and bought all the paint and supplies on Thursday afternoon with Jorge.
Plaster, Tape, Cable
Now I'm doing all the setup stuff to paint: spackling and sanding bad surfaces, taping off the trim and even masking off the cables that run around the floor. Mexican walls don't tend to have space between them for running cables, so they're always run around the floor and fastened to the wall. This is a real pain in the neck when you want to paint, because you have to decide how to handle that issue. Should you paint them? Painted cables, even if they match in color, always look crappy to me, like the proper time was not taken to deal with them and they just had paint hastily slopped over them. I'm kind of into the technical asthetic anyway, so I prefer to have cables look like cables, even if I'd prefer they were not there in the first place.
Taping Off Cables
The worst thing about this is that these cables pictured here have no real use at the moment. One is the cable for what I presume was the former cable TV hookup. Because this leads in and terminates in the bedroom (and perhaps for other reasons of which I'm unaware), when the cable guys set up our cable, they ran entirely new eyesores along the walls from new holes they punched in the wall.
You also see a phone cable there, the one that's halfway taped off in the photo above. As you may know, we don't even have phone service here. Again with the tech thing, I hate to pull any pre-existing wire, ever.
Tomorrow, Jorge is going to come over and help me paint the room. It's going to be in the 80s.
Posted by crispy at March 9, 2007 06:02 PM
Comments
I wonder if Picasso had to worry about cables?
[crispy says: Not in New York.]
Posted by: Jon at March 9, 2007 06:34 PM
Are the walls really thin and non-noise preventative? Or they really solid, preventing cable runnage?
That's a curious thing.
I imagine they ran new cable for the TV to prevent any possible quality issues with old, crapasss cableage.
Looks like you have a floor to a ceiling window. That can be a blessing and a curse.
[crispy says: No, they're really thick and solid. Places here (even those like ours that were built in the 60s or 70s) seem to be built with consideration only for having electricity. There's no built-in places for phone jacks or cable. It's wacky since telephones existed long before they were built, but I guess maybe it was a rarity, even in the 70s for Mexican homes to have phones? I don't know about that, but maybe. As for the window, yeah. Full floor-to- ceiling. It was certainly a curse for our neighbors and other passers-by before we had curtains and I had to run in to get something from those rooms wearing only my underwear. Yet overall, I really like them, and it was actually the big selling factor for this apartment. A lot of apartments here lack windows, and these make you feel like you're living in a treehouse, what with the floor-to-ceiling glass and doors that open onto the front balcony, shaded by the huge tree out front. It's nice.]
Posted by: Mark Allen at March 10, 2007 11:02 AM