Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Saving Steam

So I haven't posted in a while. And when I did, I kind of cheated a little. I wrote a whole bunch of posts in one day and scheduled them to be released on different days so that it would seem like I was a dilligent blogger. And then nothingness for days. Weeks. Maybe months? It isn't that I don't have anything to blog about. It is just that I don't have much time for writing about the projects I have been working on and events that have happened. In addition to not having much time, I don't have the steam.

We purchased a new house in December, and have been majorly renovating it ever since. I am sure you want to see pictures and hear all about it, and I have wanted to tell you all about it. There is so much to tell. December seems to have been a long time ago. Lately, I have been more anxious to get into this house of ours - we are paying for it after all, we should be living in it dontchya think?- and so I have been helping Doug at the house. We are usually there until at least midnight. This means that I am tired. Not as tired as having a newborn tired, but still...tired. Tired Jess = ditzy Jess.

I have been getting a steady stream of orders for Petit Lambie - YAY!- for which I am very grateful. But twice now, I have made mistakes. I wrote the wrong size on a hat label (even though I had made the right size) and the customer thought I had made the wrong size. After encouraging her to try it on the baby, and finding out that it was the right size, I was relieved and began to be extra conciencious about getting labeling right. I recently had two orders on the same day, and created and shipped two different hats. And I got the labeling wrong. I cross shipped the orders. So the lady who ordered blue newborn got brown 6-12 months and vice versa.

Obviously I can not keep track of labels and envelopes while sleep deprived and perhaps a little high from paint fumes and paint remover fumes. So, Petit Lambie is semi-closed. Just for now.

This means that I am not currently accepting custom order requests. I am only shipping items I have already made and in my inventory. Hopefully this also means that while I am at home with Jaden during the day, I can take naps when he does & get some sleep & save some steam for the scraping, sanding, repainting, flooring, and installing that needs to go on at my house.

If I can even focus to get the house done. I am so deflated with this whole process and every time I go to the house, I get overwhelmed at the scope of what has to be done. Especially when that means I have to undo and redo stuff that I had already done.

 I had researched how to repaint kitchen cabinets both on the internet and by interviewing Home Depot employees. I determined that I would clean the cabinets with a degreaser, sand them, and then spray paint them (with a professional paint sprayer, not cans of spray paint) for a flawless finish. Well...after days and days and hours and hours, a numb arm and aching back, my kitchen cabinets were pristine white. Yay! And then my white turned yellow. Um...not yay. So I called Home Depot and asked what the matter was. I wasn't supposed to have to do anything else. I used Behr Ultra Premium Plus awesomeness & since it is paint and primer in one & supposedly the best paint ever invented in the history of the world, I was supposed to have Ultra Pure White cabinets that stayed white. However, a different employee at Home Depot said that the stuff doesn't live up to all the hype the company markets & the person who advised me to use it hadn't been working in HD long enough to know that. So, he said that I would have to use this orange goopy stuff that strips paint off, clean the cabinets with TCP, sand them, prime them with 2 coats of this other super good primer (supposedly this stuff will seal the grease and oil based varnish on the cabinets and give me a clean base to paint) and then paint them with 2 coats of oil based paint because it provides an easy to clean hard finish. I totally cried in the Home Depot as the guy was telling me that I had wasted two gallons of paint and three weeks of my time and that I was going to have to undo it and start from scratch.

Saving up steam for that sort of stuff is going to be important. Apparently, it takes a lot!!

1 comments:

Melanie Ann Millett said...

OMGosh I am so sorry. I think I would cry.

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