Houston, We Are Go For Launch...

So we're in the midst of a HUGE construction project. We're pretty much doubling the square footage of the house - new dining and living rooms, bumping out the kitchen by six feet and adding a master suite upstairs.

I'm not really handy. I will admit to more girly-girl tendencies than I really want to, in the interests of honesty (I can actually FEEL my sister's eyes rolling into the back of her head and, in fairness, nearly everyone is a girly-girl next to this woman - she's my hero). Anyway, I'm writing to you now during a break from destruction and painting. I'll talk about the deststruction later - what I really wanted to tell you about is the paint.

My husband is an engineer. One of the things that simultaneously delights and frustrates me about him is his attention to detail. He's fastidious. He LOVES to research stuff - sometimes to the point where he's researched something for so long that all his research is out of date and he needs to start again to have fresh data. Anyway, we're going to have radiant floor heating in the addition spaces - installed by my husband, by the way. In the course of researching all about radiant floor heating, he discovered that there's a special kind of paint (and a special kind of paint additive that you can stir into your own paint) that makes your walls particularly reflective. This is good if you have radiant floor heat - the reflective qualities of the walls bounce all that infra-red back to you and keeps you toasty.

So he was explaining all of this to me (before the paint arrived from....wait for it...the Cape Canaveral, Florida neighborhood - this is Space Shuttle technology here, folks!) when he explains that it's the equivalent of papering your walls with tin foil, which means we're safe from alien mind waves.

Painting with this stuff is a pain in the ass, though. When we mix the additive to the ceiling paint, it goes on nicely for the first little while, then the grey sploches start popping up. Painting with the stuff that arrived from Florida really IS the equivalent of painting tin foil onto the walls. I keep telling myself that it will all be worth it when we're cuddled up in our nice, toasty living room while winter howls outside, but it seems like a lot of work right now...