My Kingdom for some Varsol

Here’s an anecdote from what already seems like the distant past. It’s June 16th, our first full day in the house. Jen is in France at her conference. I’m thinking that I should start some of the messy tasks that we want to get out of the way before all our stuff shows up. (The two tasks being stripping the awful wallpaper in my office, and painting at least the ground floor.)

On the ground floor it wasn’t that the previous colours were awful. They were just scuffed and there were about a billion nails and hangers in the wall. As there was a fairly large cache of paint in the basement (well labelled with colour numbers) I decided that I would get them out and try to match colour to wall.

One by one the paint cans came up from the basement. Some of the rooms have similar colours and it was a task to try to figure out which was which from thin smears of paint on the outside of the cans. As I worked I built up a spreadsheet of room, paint, number, base (latex mostly) and finish. There were probably over 20 cans of paint in the basement, some clearly from previous owners… a history in there somewhere I’m sure. (There were also some rolls of ugly wallpaper… what is with that!)

Eventually I found two cans of green that matched the wall colour by the front door. I figured I’d open the can, stir it up and daub a bit of paint under a light switch cover to see if it matched. It did.

Next was a can of yellow paint, but I needed to clean off the stir stick to stir up the yellow. Over to the kitchen, and turned on the water and began to rub the stick with my fingers to get the paint off.

Odd, I thought, this is very gluey paint.

Odd, I thought, this paint does not seem to be coming off the stick very well.

Odd, I thought, perhaps this is not latex paint.

It was not latex paint.

So here’s your man, standing with the water running in an empty house, in regular nice-enough clothes, with both hands slathered in green oil-based house paint.

After uttering a few choice words, I began to explore the house looking for something to clean the paint off with. I went down to the basement (opening the door with the back of my hands) and checked out the paint cans. Surely there must be one of those ubiquitous cans of Varsol around or something. No ubiquitous can of Varsol was to be found. More choice words.

I went back upstairs, uselessly ran more water over the stick, succeeded in smearing even more paint on my hands, wandered to the front door (closed), looked out the window for a while, contemplated what the steering wheel and gear shift of my car would look like with green oil paint smears, experimented with the unpleasant stickiness of my fingers and generally felt sorry for myself.

I decided to go down to the basement one more time. This time I spotted a weird glass pickle jar full of solid yellow goo. Taking the goo jar out, I looked at a few useless things behind it (wd-40 etc) and went to leave. I decided to put the goo jar back in the cupboard and that’s when I noticed it… a little white hand-written sticker labelled paint thinner on the lid of the goo jar.

I took the goo jar up to the kitchen and opened the lid in the sink. Surprisingly a little tiny bit of liquid was over the top of the goo. I poured the gooey liquid onto my hands and presto the paint started to dissolve. A bit more liquid came out and it was enough to clean off the stick.

Needless to say I was so relieved that I wasn’t going to have to leave handprints all over town in a fit of Varsol purchasing…

It makes you think, though, how many years ago did that paint thinner get stashed away down there. And why did it turn into weird yellow goo? I guess I have to smile back 20 years to thank that person for leaving the varsol which wound up in my empty house on my first full day of home ownership — when it was exactly what I needed.

return to cmh blog

› domicile     2005-08-04 15:54   ...1