Free time these days is taken up by working on our house and yard. To say that there is a lot of deferred maintenance may just be the understatement of the year. We’ve evicted bats, hacked a jungle living under our deck, grew a garden, learned to pressure can, put in new floors, painted the outside of the house, cleaned the pellet stove, and put in windows, just to name a fraction of the chores.

We just need to tackle the leaky garage (new door, new roof, re-pour the concrete that was chiseled up) and stabilize the house in the hopes it doesn’t wash down the hill in the next torrential downpour. You know, the usual.

So it was with a bit of relief that I decided to tackle painting the two bathrooms. My husband had blasted one in white when he used a paint sprayer to cover up the pink before we moved in. The other was a tasteful grey-blue, which I liked, but there were smears of grey from the door and pencil marks on the wall from where the previous owners marked it to hang the medicine cabinet straight. The bathroom was the least of our worries, so got pushed to the end of the list.

I’ve decided to make my life easy and always just get plain ceiling paint, usually going with Behr. For some reason, I ended up with Glidden pure white ceiling paint this go-round and I can tell you with 100% certainty that it is the worst paint I have ever used in my entire life. I’ll lump into that category the oil-based paint I used on kitchen cabinets once and the time we refinished and hand stained original hardwood floors in a 1950s house. It goes on like water. Really- you know those “watercolor” books that kids have where you just dip a paintbrust in water and smear it over the page and color appears? It reminded me of that.

To make matters worse, in the previously pink bathroom, someone had decided to get creative and do a swirly design in the ceiling with what I can only assume was a mud trowel. I suppose it looked quirky and fun with the pink walls and the purple and pink zigzags, but I think there’s a special place in hell for that person.

So, if you decided to paint once and got Glidden paint and felt bad because even a monkey can paint and yours turned out awful, you can rest assured that it wasn’t you. It was the paint.

The thing I love about paint is that it can quickly transform a room, and for rather cheap in comparison. I used to always fret over getting the perfect color, but my husband has been reminding me that “it’s not the Taj Majal.” It’s a good reminder for a perfectionist like myself to jump into a project and start. If I waited for perfect conditions or the perfect color, I’d probably wait forever.