It's only for a week, but oh my

We are having our kitchen painted. Eleven years of Chinese red will make way to a new era of Dill. (We went back and forth between Dill and Pickle. We are still not sure we chose well, and won't know until the color is on the walls.)  At the same time, as long as the painter is here, we asked him to patch and repaint a wall upstairs, in the yellow bedroom.

A tree fell on that side of the house during a storm oh, maybe seven or eight years ago, and the wall has been patched and repainted twice since then but continues to crack.

It's been a long time since we've had any work of this kind done in our house, and I had forgotten how disruptive it is. It's not just the kitchen and the bedroom that are in upheaval. Oh, no. The dining room is a mess; all of the artwork from the kitchen walls, the kitchen ceiling lamp, the dogs' water dish, the block of butcher knives, the breadbox, the paper towels, and other sundry items are all heaped on the table, floor and buffet.

Our sanctuaries, the two porches, are also in use: the front porch table is loaded with the coffee pot, the dog biscuit container, the leashes and mutt mitts (so the dog walker doesn't have to go into the kitchen when she comes), and the tea maker, which we use every evening.

The kitchen table has been dismantled, in order to get it through the doorway, and now lies on its side on the back porch, its severed limbs by its side.

Upstairs, the yellow room is a mess. Its chair is now in our bedroom, and one of its bookcases has been shoved right up against my dresser, which makes it pretty darned hard for me to open the drawer to get fresh underwear, and there is a slippery drop cloth on the floor that makes me slide like a cartoon character every time I set foot through the doorway.

It's been two days, and in that time the painter has patched and spackled the kitchen walls and ceiling, and not one wall of the yellow room, but three. (My, that tree had impact! Or maybe it's the trains that go by several times a day, shaking our little house.)

There is spackle dust everywhere, and bits of spackle crunching underfoot. We sweep and vacuum and swipe the tops of things and sweep again. And it's only been, as I said, two days.

Last night we were sitting on the front porch, amidst all the coffee pots and rubble, and Riley jumped up on the couch next to me to look out the window. His tail.....has it always had that big swath of white? Ah, spackle amongst the speckles. We spent the rest of the evening trying to catch him so we could chip the spackle out of his tail.

It's only for a week....we hope. The painter had promised us that he could do it all in five days. But he is a man who has a great work-life balance, which is one reason he's a self-employed painter, and last night he knocked off early to go play softball. On Monday night he said, looking thoughtfully at the mess, "Your ceiling was in worse shape than I'd thought. If it takes more than five days, would that be so bad?"

I say yes, it would be. Doug says yes. Riley (whirling around to chew on his tail) says yes. Boscoe, toddling along, bumping into things, sweetly and blissfully unaware, did not vote.