Painting persianas – the world’s most boring job?

I was concentrating so hard on my mission to remove seven years’ worth of built-up cal from a loo we’d never actually used (Mallorcan water is notoriously hard), that I didn’t hear The Boss come into The Den’s tiny shower room behind me.

“Er . . . I thought we were supposed to be painting the persianas?” He stood with his hands on his hips, wearing a quizzical frown – and a fine head-to-toe veil of dust, resulting from his labours with the electric sander and our exterior shutters.

Dividing the chores

When it comes to decorating, The Boss is head of sanding (the dust makes me sneeze and, besides, he’d never let me play with – sorry, use – the electric sander.  I’m the ‘lucky’ person who gets to wield the brush with bristle alopecia, and the treacle-like Spanish gloss paint.

Well, I’d finished painting the back door shutters and had been waiting for him to finish sanding the next set. With my brush sitting in a jar of white spirit, I’d decided to fill the time usefully and make some progress in the annexe we were trying to turn back into the third en suite bedroom it had been for the previous owners.

A word of warning if you’re thinking of living in an old finca: every job completed results in a new one (or more) for the everlasting To Do list. Not only did we discover that the door into the shower room was peppered with woodworm holes, but, on first flush of the newly gleaming loo, we also realised there was a problem with some of the twiddly bits in the cistern, and the water wouldn’t stop running. Twiddly bits were removed and the loo was once again out of commission for the foreseeable future.

A pair of newly-sanded shutters, moulting brush and can of gloopy gloss beckoned; plumbing and woodworm problems would have to wait.

A slightly different version of the above was posted on my previous blog.

Jan Edwards ©2009