Taping Up

For our last act of the great house remodel of 2009, we had to move every bit of crap out of our downstairs so that the floors could be refinished. We spent all weekend making room in the garage so that it could serve as a mini storage unit, then actually moving furniture and boxes out. By 5:00, I was whipped, but I wasn’t finished.

I still had to tape plastic over cabinets and shelves, to protect all of our stuff from the dust storms created by floor sanders. At 6:00, I started unrolling plastic and trying to tape it up.

For some reason, Mrs. theskinnyonbenny bought plastic sheeting so large and so thick that it could be rolled out to protect the Tiger Stadium turf during a rain delay. She also bought a roll of that great blue masking tape that won’t rip the paint off of your newly painted trim when you pull it off.

	Blue tape is not money.

That tape is the best stuff in the world, unless you actually want it to hold up your plastic. Gravity scoffs at the holding force of the blue masking tape. It took me an hour or more to figure out, but I developed a new technique, whereby I tape the blue tape to the trim, and then tape the plastic to the blue tape with duct tape, being ever so careful that the duct tape not touch anything except blue tape or plastic sheeting.

I then spent several hours cutting sheets and using my patented technique to cover shelves. It took longer than it had to, as I got sucked in to a college baseball game that didn’t even feature LSU, and because I had to make a late night run to Wal Mart to buy more tape. I couldn’t get my phone out fast enough to take a picture, but on my way back from Wal Mart, I passed a fully grown man, riding a full size mountain bike down College Drive, and the bike had training wheels. I shit you not.

After the baseball game, I kicked off the pilot episode of Nurse Jackie on Showtime. I had it on DVR, but the first time I tried to watch it, I fell asleep, and the second time I started it, Mrs. theskinnyonbenny showed up with a link to this video:

I enjoyed that so much that we used the “View YouTube through Tivo� feature for the first time to find other literal videos. There are some good ones out there, but this one was my favorite.

Getting back to Sunday, I did a tweet that compared my kitchen to the rooms in Dexter, where he covers everything in plastic wrap before sawing up his victims. I can only hope that he's quicker about it than I am. If I were going to commit a similar murder, the person would have plenty of time to work his way out of his predicament while I hung plastic.

I finally finished putting up plastic around 11:00. Then – having no furniture – I sat on the hard wood floor, ate some ice cream, and pretty quickly fell asleep right there.