At last, the garage has paint

When it comes to long-term projects, I don't have much patience.

Who would have ever dreamed it would take seven years to get the garage painted?

Our house dates from the 1950s. It's solid as a rock and surrounded by enormous trees.

When we bought the house about this time in 1997, we made several discoveries.

Bad discovery: The sewer line was full of roots.

Good discovery: After the first rainstorm, we had no leaks -- and the basement was dry.

Bad discovery: There was no insulation in the attic.

Good discovery: Underneath the wall-to-wall carpets in every room except the family room -- a 1960s addition -- there were pristine, never-walked-on hardwood floors.

Bad discovery: Every room had one wall -- just one wall -- that was wallpapered.

So we set about undoing half a century of benign neglect.

Stage 1 was uncovering the floors, adding a hardwood-looking laminate floor in the family room, stripping all the wallpaper and having every square inch of wall and trim covered with fresh paint. We also had insulation blown into the attic.

Stage 2 came a couple of years later when we had the kitchen gutted, a wall or two moved, soffits knocked out and new maple cabinets, new appliances, new Italian-tile floors and new Spanish-tile walls installed based on a plan my wife and I (mostly my wife) dreamed up. We are tickled with the results, although I personally would rather build a new house, which we did in 1986, than remodel another room.

Stage 3 came last year when we had the sewer line replaced, new central air and heat installed and new windows put in. My wife says a good way to end a perfectly decent marriage of nearly 40 years is to replace the windows of your house. I have to reluctantly agree.

An ongoing Stage 4 consists of my landscaping projects that have resulted in two rock-walled gardens, a small backyard secret garden and, of course, the never-ending patio water feature.

That left the garage as Stage 5. The first thing anyone noticed about the garage was that its walls were a special weathered green that looks the way I feel when I have an upset stomach.

So you can imagine how delighted we are that the garage makeover is complete. It started last year when a painter made the huge, double-wide steel door, vintage 1958, gleam like a new set of teeth -- and the side door too.

This week a young painter attacked the walls with a refreshing light coating of a creamy color called Navajo, which we have used in houses in five states.

The trickiest part was putting together a new storage cabinet and pegboard hutch to go over my trusty workbench. The pegboard hutch includes a shop light and electrical plug-ins, but it needed to be mounted on the wall a few inches above my workbench. My wife and I couldn't hold the hutch up to fasten it to the wall, so I had to find a helper -- and fast.

I'm pleased to report that our help came from the set of 1950s World Book encyclopedias we inherited from my wife's folks. At one end I put M and W-X-Y-Z, and at the other end I put S and T to get the hutch perfectly level with the top of the utility cabinet.

I would like to be able to say there are no more stages. But owning a house mirrors the human body. There is something else that needs attention. Right now, I'd like to focus on patio furniture. Does La-Z-Boy make a patio recliner?

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.