Widow (w)rites . . .: Can One Paint Hunter Douglas Vertical Blinds (and by "one," I mean "me," of course)?

Jen + whooping cough = bad combo. Leads to boredom which leads to Aimlessly Wandering around the house looking for Projects to do, which leads to Potential Disaster. I can truly hear Bob's voice in my head, Stay in bed, woman! You're sick! You're supposed to be resting—you'll never get better if you don't let your body recover properly! He said that kind of thing a lot to me—not that I got sick a lot, but I often don't rest properly when I do get sick because let's face it, being sick a huge waste of time. But he's not physically here to wrestle me down, so I have been trying to do the general population a favor and self-quarantine till the worst of my symptoms have quieted, and have done a pretty good job of resting the past few days, but I am now officially Stir Crazy, and want out. Now, dammit. Or at least to be up and moving. I seriously think I have bedsores from all this lying around, but I don't feel sick, other than when the coughing fit sneaks up and pile-drives me from the top rope, but other wise, I feel fine! Totally!

Motel 6 blinds, before painting

So, being up and at 'em more today than I have in a few days, I noticed a number of dings and scratches on the wall from when I moved back to the house and decided that now is the best time to take care of them. Not three weeks ago, when I was feeling better, not not four months ago, when they happened. Now, when I'm sick. So, I got a can of paint out, to touch up the dining room walls, which lead to getting another can of paint out, to touch up the basement walls, which lead to getting out the can of Vanilla White, to touch up some trim and a railing (the one that was trashed when I hung Bob's canvases the other day. Yes, when I was sick), which lead to touching up a few spots on my kitchen cabinets which lead to just painting whole damn set of cabinets not just in the kitchen but in the mud room, as well, because evidently, either the paint I used when I first painted the cabinets was a different shade of Vanilla White, or it's discolored somewhat over the years, and the touchups were glaringly obvious (probably only to me). Which got me looking sideways at the ugly Hunter Douglas vertical blinds that have been hanging over the kitchen patio door since we moved in. We have four patio doors in this house and it was my goal to eventually replace each set of dated verticals with something funkier, more up-to-date. Right now, the ones hanging sadly on the windows look like they were scavenged from a cheap motel. I would actually get rid of them entirely, but when my mom house/dog sits for me, she has to close every blind in the house at night, because she's convinced the woods behind our house is teeming with perverted peepers. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I rarely pull the blinds unless the sun is actually, literally blinding me. Otherwise, they're more fashion than function for this chick. But, for my dear mother, I will keep them.

Cool Ikea panels. And yes, the telescope is for peeping at the neighbors.

I did replace the blinds in the bedroom with a set of really cool wide-panels from Ikea, but that was one home improvement project that took far longer than I had expected, was much more complicated than the damn Ikea stick-figure instructions lead me to believe (I still haven't sawed the excess six inches off either end of the metal panel rail, because by that point, I was ready to throw a chair through the patio door, and thought it best to just step away . . . after six years, I'm pretty sure that ain't gonna happen, ever) and turned out to be more expensive than I thought it would. Four wide panels x all the hardware x my time and labor = about a million dollars. But they look cool, and that's all that matters, when all is said and done.

So, paintbrush and paint can in hand, I'm eyeballing these sponge-painted-ish (and I mean ish) Hunter Douglas eyesores in my kitchen today, and thought, man, that'd be really expensive, to replace all the blinds in the house, not to mention a serious strain on my already fragile sanity. Suddenly, the idea occurred to me: why not paint them??!! I am not above painting anything that doesn't breath (and sometimes I do paint things that breath, like spiders that don't get out of the way of my paintbrush. And myself)! Why not at least try to paint these muthas? At the very least, if I hate 'em, I get new blinds, which is really the whole point, anyhow! Genius! In my head, I'm thinking I might potentially be saving hundreds of dollars and have really cool, custom blinds to boot, while at the same time, I can also hear Bob's logical voice saying, Yeah, but you don't even like vertical blinds! And, if you don't like how they turn out, which is very likely, knowing you, Jen, you'll have wasted all that time, when you could have just gone out and bought the blinds you wanted and saved yourself a whole lot of trouble to begin with . . . "Wasting time" is not the point, when it comes to DIY. And DYI is not about being logical. It's about being creative, and resourceful, and clever, and—and—and . . . okay, a little nuts.

Painting the fireplace . . .

So, below are a few before pics for you to see what I'm starting with. I know many might think, "Those are perfectly good blinds, Jen! Why can't you just leave well enough alone!" But, you see, my brain doesn't operate that way. My dinning room table and chairs were perfectly good in their own right, but I got sick of them and painted them black. Our fireplaces were also perfectly fine, just minding their own business, but they weren't breathing, see, so I painted them. Kitchen cabinets, same dealio. Paint is the cheapest, easiest way way to change a room, breathe new life into one's life. I've been a firm believer of this since we bought our first home, a lifetime ago. Bob didn't share this paint-o-philia of mine; mostly, he'd sigh heavily and say something like, "What are you going to do when it doesn't turn out?" To which I'd reply, "I'm not even going to worry about that because I know it will turn out, I can see it in my head!" To which he'd reply, "That's what scares me. I'm going golfing . . ." Stay tuned, kids!