My Mistake..sort of, kind of..

Our garage right now is beautiful--not quite a work of art but really rather nice for a garage that actually is a garage with a car in it and loads of stuff that needs to be kept in a garage.  That same garage was a disaster from January until just last week.  Which was really disappointing because in the last few years we have put a lot of work into organizing it and in the fall we were confident that this winter would be different and it would stay neat enough until spring.  Hah!  A few things foiled that plan.

First, in January, I went on my annual January craze of organizing and reorganizing. I love to start the year off right as so many other people do--that's why the Canadian Tire flyer is full of organizing materials in January.   This year with all those extra hours to tear apart closets and sort through drawers the pile of items to give away, take to the cottage or donate grew and grew.  And it grew in the garage, neatly against the wall at the bottom of the stairs.  Neatly but still in a guilt inducing don't look at me way.  A pile that was annoying and irritating every time you passed by it.

The second thing that destroyed the plan is that grown children sometimes need space to store their things while they go away or they because they don't have a place for their summer tires.  That kind of storage makes things really tight so there is no room to put anything else.

Well the grown children responsible for the storing of things were here last week collecting those things.  And as the wonderful adults that they are they cleaned and organized the garage after they reclaimed their things.  It was a way of saying thank you for the storage.  I painted a bench and spray painted planters while they worked in the garage.  A truly wonderful way to spend the afternoon.

That beautifully clean, organized garage inspired me to do some further upgrading of the space.  I had found a can of white paint to use on the bench, and there was enough left to use in the garage to repaint the door into the house and the door out into the yard.  That cleaned up some rather messy doors nicely.  Then I decided to paint the garage stair railings that managed to survive for twenty-five years without paint.  That turned out well and really brightened things up.

I was satisfied for a day or two but I still had some paint remaining.  Hmmm...maybe the actual stair threads could use a coat of paint.   Then they would match the railing and over time they would lose the paint but would take on that nice worn look.  That's what I was thinking.  So I did it.  I painted the stair threads with a nice thick coat of paint and planned to do a second coat the next day.

That was a mistake.  And it took only a little bit of time to figure this out.

I had left the garage door open so that the warm air could dry the paint before people needed to use the stairs.  However the cat from next door also came to visit.  He left his very dirty paw prints on my lovely dry white paint. Every footstep showed.  Every footstep is going to show.  My lovely white paint is already filthy.  Not in a timeworn shabby chic kind of way but in a nasty, non-glamorous, need to be cleaned kind of way.

I am not going to do another coat, I am not going to wash those stairs so I will need to live with the glaring dirt until the paint wears off.  Hopefully soon.   I will find a way to use the remainder of that paint.  And it won't be a mistake.