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paint spill disaster
Friday, March 10 2017
This morning Quentin & Natasha came over with their dog Coach Eric Taylor and then Nancy came with her similarly-looking dog Jack and they all went with Gretchen and our dogs Ramona and Neville for a big walk in the forest. There'd been a couple inches of snow overnight, but it was fairly warm. Evidently it was warm enough for Ramona and Neville to go off on their own adventure without their friends. Everybody came back without them, and it was a little weird to be hanging out drinking coffee while the two visiting dogs had to amuse themselves without the companionship of their canine hosts. Quentin had housesat for us when we spent the night in the city for our attendance at the live Snap Judgment podcast, and, on looking over our hot sauce collection, noted that he'd really liked one of our hot sauces but wasn't sure which it was. It turned out it was the Sontava habañero sauce from Belize, which was missing from our collection at the time. So I went and fetched him a bottle (I always keep three or four unopened ones on hand). The only place I know where you can get it around here is ShopRite, where (I noted a month or so ago) it is the most expensive hot sauce that they stock. Most people react to my various hot sauces by either saying they are too hot for them or by saying something nice and polite. But I had the feeling that if Quentin was going to volunteer something about the hot sauce that happens to be my long-to-arrive favorite, then he might be something of a real hot sauce aficionado.
Gretchen needed some finer sanding pads to complete her work on the kitchen island resanding project, which had filled the kitchen and dining room with sawdust in a variety of grain sizes. While she was in town to get those (and other things), I told her to pick up two quarts of paint, one "lemon twist" yellow and the other "blue chip" blue (those are Sherwin Williams colors).
When Gretchen got back, I was composing an email to a poor woman in fundraising that would cause her to spend two hours of her afternoon fixing bad data (it wasn't my fault the data was bad, but I didn't think it was a good use of my time to fix it either). Gretchen appeared in the doorway with a glum look on her face. Evidently she'd dropped one of the quarts of paint she'd just bought and now there was a paint spill of blue chip blue. I didn't know yet where it had happened or how bad it was, but I knew it was a disaster. When painting, I've often thought about what I would have to do if I suddenly spilled the bucket of paint I was working from. Such thoughts have made me extra careful with buckets of paint, whether they had a lid on them or not. In this case, it soon turned out, the quart of paint in question had somehow gone bounding down the steps into the basement. It would be hard for any paint bucket to stay sealed during such a calamity. In this case, the bucket now had a dent in its side, indicating it had impacted a step on its side at some point on the way down. Such an impact would cause a large pressure increase that would almost certainly blow the top off. That is indeed what appeared to have happened.
[REDACTED]
I knew I had to act fast, so I grabbed a large scraper from the kitchen (it was one Gretchen uses for various baking tasks and had been using to remove accumulated sawdust from the island) and went down to the spill. Using the scraper, I was able to salvage a fair amount of paint from the floor (which is covered with the vinyl faux-wood tiles) and even some from a large spatter on the wall. There was, of course, still plenty to deal with once I'd gotten rid of the pools of the stuff. I used dry rags to take way what I could and then turned to dilution and sponging. With multiple passes, I'd removed all the paint from all the hard surfaces: the floor, the wainscoting, and trim. Towards the end there, I was using a toothbrush to get the paint out of the embossed vertical lines in the wainscoting. There was still a big blue blob on the drywall part of the wall, and there were several tablespoons of paint soaked into the olive-green carpet on the steps. I couldn't do anything to save that carpet, so in disgust I tore it out as best I could, cutting my right wrist and left thumb with the sharp points of staples. By now I was completely naked so as not to have to keep pulling up my sleeves or worrying about what I was kneeling it.
Eventually I cut out the lower half of the stairway carpet, rolled it up, and took it out to the garage. As for all the blue paint mixed with a couple gallons water wrung from sponges, I figured I'd let the environment deal with it ærobically, so I dumped it in the weeds just north of the house, where it quickly froze into a blue spatter in the plunging temperatures. Gretchen was feeling apologetic and sheepish, and when she asked if I wanted a sandwich, I suggested she make me one using faux fish cutlets.
The paint cleanup had taken about an hour, but it had been pretty successful. All traces of the paint were gone except on repaintable surfaces. The loss of the carpet on the stairway was a bit of a bummer, but that's only because we haven't been able to come up with a replacement for it; it's gone from everywhere else except the Gunther Room. Gretchen likes to maintain carpet on stairways to make it easier for our dogs to get up and down, particularly as they get older. But there are other options that are probably more attractive. Now that the carpet is gone, we're forced to find a replacement for that 14 year old decision.
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