... is what I was thinking when I was painting at the shelter this morning. I have been doing some yard work in recent weeks, and it gets pretty dang hot out there... but I can come in and flop down on the cool kitchen tile floor and soon recover from potential heat stroke. Generally speaking, I am not a sweaty person, and rarely get to the point of 'smelly', but I confessed to the young girls who were painting walls in that small room with me today, that it was pretty obvious that my deodorant had already quit for the day. It was unbelievably hot and sticky, with the strong aroma of paint, lots of dust roiling through the building from the people using belt sanders.
That building, at least a hundred years old, with probably twenty coats of paint in places, made of brick, with mortar coming off the walls in chunks, was miserable. Apparently there has been so much dry-walling, putting up sheetrock to divide a big space into smaller rooms, along with mudding the joints/seams and sanding it all smooth, the AC has taken a hit. The manager called the HVAC guy who said: 'of course it isn't cooling, you have all the windows and doors open.' But we did that for survival: it must have been 95 degrees in there when we arrived at 9:00 a.m.
Lots of floor fans, lots of window/box fans, stirring up the dust as well as a semi-breeze, making the paint dry faster, if not actually cooling the worker-bees off. I never meant to devote my whole day to it, but have already volunteered to go back another day. I don't mind doing more of the tedious small stuff, painting around edges, trimming out woodwork, door frames, corners that won't get done with rollers. The building was a warehouse of sorts, storage for Habitat for Humanity, so probably would not ever be really habitable by picky standards, but as my mom loved to say: "You can cover up a multitude of sins with a bucket of paint". When you roller and brush on enough layers of fresh new paint, it will do well to provide a safe haven for women and families in distress.
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