I Thought I Was Finished

Last night, I thought I was finished.  With one exception reserved,* I thought all the repairing, patching, painting, and touching up needed in my 3rd floor study was done.

The white trim, where needed, was recoated in semi-gloss latex, and any encroachments of the dark yellow hue painted over.

I'd gone around with a sponge brush and with the light yellow paint concealed the mar-marks that wouldn't scrub off on the west and north walls.

I'd pushed my utility table and my drafting table back against the wall, and carefully rehung the oak drawer unit on its brackets on the wall.

Except for the protection over the long wooden file cabinet (owing to the above-mentioned exception), the drop cloths and plastic sheets were taken away, to lie until needed, rolled up in the doorless closet in the 2nd floor hallway below.  Paint, paint trays, rollers, brushes, rags-- all or most were removed to the stairhead below, to await the trip back to the basement workshop.  The carpet was vacuumed, the work surfaces were dusted and wiped.

By this time it was rising 5:00 AM.  Yes, I repeat it, nearly five o'clock in the morning.  I hadn't been working and straightening all that time; no, more than once I'd succumbed to the lure of the computer and sat down to watch past episodes of Holmes on Homes on YouTube.  Or, more to the point of rectifying problems in my own house, I'd been researching the pros and cons of spray foam insulation, which, if I can manage the cost, may prove to be the best replacement for the moldering pink fiberglass in my attic crawl space roof.  

Why didn't I save both diversions and labor for later and go to bed?  Because it seemed necessary that the decks be cleared for the visit of the roof inspector this morning at 8:30 AM, so he could examine the length and breadth of my 3rd floor, if required, without tripping over dropcloths and paint cans.  And until the cleanup was complete, I wasn't turning in.

But by quarter to five it pretty much was, and I spared a few moments to gaze and admire my handiwork in the stairwell.

Even so, I couldn't help noticing a problem with the touch up paint on the west wall.  That light yellow was a color mix of my own, concocted when I first painted my study in 2003 from three or more Sherwin-Williams colors, I not liking any of the ones they had in stock.  The can I've been working with is an attempt at matching that was made back in January of 2009 when the drawer unit fell off the wall.  I wasn't wholly convinced by the match then, and the best I can say about it now is that at least it was enough to do the east wall and the part of the north wall contiguous to it in one whole new coat.  But the 2009 "matched" paint has a definite grayish cast not present in the 2003 original.  Usually, with the shape of the room and rarity of direct sunlight through the gable windows, the difference isn't noticeable, even at touch-up spots.  But at five o'clock this morning, just above the cabinets sitting against my west wall, I noticed it all right.  Don't know if I'd raked some unmixed bit of pigment off the bottom of the quart can, or if my brush or the wall itself wasn't clean, but those spots looked dirty.   Flat-out smudgy, grubby dirty.  As Mike Holmes would say, "Unacceptable!"

I came closer to get a better look, and that's when I saw it.  Just visible above the surface of my sewing table, insinuating its winding way up the pale yellow wall, was a crack.  A crack I hadn't noticed before.  Not a bad crack, not a wide crack, but--

I looked under the sewing table.  Oh, crappolitis!  It was a bad crack.  And in the run of things, a wide crack as well.  And it had a brother crack along with it.

Oh! Oh! Oh!  I thought I was finished with all that!  I've taken it all downstairs to put away!  And now it's back to joint compound and primer and paint and redoing the baseboard paint (which'll surely get mucked up in the process), and oh! oh! why can't I ever be done!?
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*I've decided my bookshelves and the ledge outside the attic hatch need to be redone in oil based paint.  And of course I still need to finish painting the back walls of the built-in bookcases.