Unfinished Business

“All ghosts have unfinished business.” This is a line from 1995 movie “Casper” that keeps popping into my head. I’m not a ghost, but sometimes I feel like I have an awful lot of unfinished projects…probably because I get sidetracked and forget about them.

My July project was redecorating my 10-year-old daughter’s bedroom in a Harry Potter theme. We were off to a great start but then needed help with the larger ventures, so the momentum slowly dwindled. Well, the past two weekends, my husband spent all his free time helping us with the biggest project: Zoe’s bed. Since it is essentially the top part of a bunk bed (a bed on stilts, if you will), we had to disassemble it. Once we took out all the nuts, bolts, and screws, it was much easier to manage so we schlepped it out to the garage. My husband used a planer, which is a woodworking tool that is usually used to trim wooden boards to a specified thickness consistently; it also helps to strip paint.

However, since many of the boards we used to build Zoe’s bed were slightly warped, the planer missed a few spots. Luckily, my husband also has an electric sander, so Zoe and I took turns spot-sanding the remainder of the previous coats of paint, which were all kinds of Easter bunny pastel colors. It took a few days and a couple very large trash bags…if we could sell the sawdust, we’d be rich.

Once the boards were mostly free of turquoise, pink, and purple, Zoe and I tackled the project of staining them a darker brown. We both found this process fairly satisfying as she and I enjoy painting…Nik does not, which is why he focused his efforts on fixing this week’s vehicle issues.

The bed remains in dozens of pieces in my garage and is…still not finished, but mostly because I do not trust myself to try to put it back together while also meeting the required stability or without any leftover pieces. There are also a few specs of pastel colors that we need to remove because apparently stain does not cover it. But Nik did say he could help us do touch-ups and reassemble the bed on his day off this weekend, so hopefully the limbo will be short-lived. Meanwhile, Zoe will continue to sleep on her mattress which is currently tucked into the corner of her bedroom, and be kept warm by two 75-pound rottweilers who do not understand the meaning of the word bedtime.