Anniversary Adventures (Part 5)

We went into Pigeon Forge on Saturday to see what there was to see. Most of it didn't really appeal to us, or wasn't yet open for whichever shows the theaters were performing, but we found a few things to interest us. It was raining, though, so the one thing we'd intended to do in Pigeon Forge wasn't exactly convenient to do.

During our honeymoon in 2000, we went panning for gems. It was probably four days into our trip and we'd done everything we had a desire to do in Gatlinburg itself. (Well, the stuff that was open, at least, which wasn't much. In fact, about the only folks doing major business were the time-share sales people who lurked on every corner, leaping out to offer you riches beyond imagining if only you would consent to spending three scant hours of your time listening to their sales pitch. After one particularly aggressive sales guy kept after us, I had to explain to him that it was the final day of our honeymoon trip and there was no way in hell we were spending any more if it with him, so he needed to back off. Reluctantly, he did.) So we'd headed to pigeon forge and decided to stop at the gem-panning place. It was a pretty simple setup, in which the gem-panning clerk, dressed in overalls, brought us each a sieve and poured a box of rocks and bits into a long trough of running water and we got to sift through it to look for crystals and precious stones, probably none of which were native to the area, but what do I know? This trough was located outside, but under an awning, surrounded by parking spaces. Our car still had all of the wedding decoration my groomsmen had bestowed upon it, including the traditional cans tied to the bumper and shoe-polish painted windows that read "PORTRAIT OF A MARRIED COUPLE" on the windshield and "DONE GOT HITCHED" across the back window...

DIGRESSION: Some of my friends are infamous for truly heinous wedding car-decoration, to the point that when my friend John was married, his parents hid the car they would be journeying to the honeymoon in at the home of friends of friends of people they were pretty sure none of us knew for fear that we would do something horrible to it involving inflated condoms. So, instead, we just did those things to the vehicle in which they were leaving the church--which was all the same to us. Oh, and while his parents were asleep, we also rearranged all of their living room furniture so that each piece was 180 degrees from it's usual position--as if the room itself was on a giant turntable. This wasn't actually done out of any kind of revenge against them, but more to screw with the head of John's cousin Mike, who'd passed out drunk on one of their sofas and who we thought would completely lose his shit when he woke up in the middle of the night and nothing looked familiar. To say John's mother was "not pleased" is probably putting it lightly, because every stick of furniture was back in its original location and an icy stare was turned in our direction for the rest of the following day. Having heard some of these tales, my wife had instructed my best man, Joe, that he was welcome to do whatever he wanted to my car, but if anything they did made her grandmother cry, she would find all responsible parties and her revenge would be long and unpleasant. We therefore got off light.

While we were panning for gravel, another couple arrived to do so, saw our car and asked us if we were newlyweds. We said we were and it turned out they, too, were newlyweds. Naturally, the subject of our respective weddings came up and we asked them how many days ago they had been married. They replied that they'd been wed just the previous day.

"And when did you get married?" they asked us, smiles beaming.

"Oh, about four days ago," we said.

At this, their faces fell into a state of appalled disbelief, particularly the girl's. She cast a glance back at our still fully decorated car and curtly explained that they had washed all of the decorations from their car immediately after the wedding. They'd not even made it out of the city limits of their home town, let alone all the way to Gatlinburg with so much as a single can still affixed. After this revelation, we could tell that their estimation of us had clearly been dialed down to about a 2, for they didn't seem to have much more to say to us. Meanwhile, the wife and I both quietly thought their offense at our aged decorations was quite funny and we could hardly contain our mirth until we were finally able to bust up laughing once we'd finished our panning and returned to the confines of our offensive car.

We not only kept the decorations on for the rest of our honeymoon, but made it back to Charlotte with one surviving can tied to the bumper and it was another full week after our return before I bothered to wash off the shoe-polish.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Anniversary Adventures (Part 4)

Beyond all the changes to Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, we already knew this trip was going to be different for us in another major respect: cash.

During our actual honeymoon, in February of 2000, I was only doing weekend work in radio in Charlotte (not precisely lucrative) while my wife was in transition as a retail clothing store assistant manager and was only then about to start in a new position in Charlotte, though not at the good store she'd been promised when she agreed to stay on as manager for a store that had closed in Shelby, but instead the assy store, where the customers regularly let their kids shit in the dressing rooms. We didn't have a lot of dough going into our marriage. (In fact, we didn't have a lot of food for that trip, either, because while our family had quite thoughtfully assembled for us an enormous sampler pack of the grub from our wedding reception--none of which we'd been able to get more than a bite of during the actual reception because we kept getting shuffled around to cut cakes and open presents and pose for pictures--they'd also quite thoughtfully put it in the wrong car. I still have a craving for Lil' Smokies to this day.) So while we had splurged a bit on our honeymoon cabin (or so it seemed at the time), we were still trying to keep to a budget for the rest of the trip were very careful when it came to actually buying anything while we were there. Within a year and a half after our marriage, the wife was accepted into med school here in WV and we were soon living even poorer than before, in a depressed job market in an already financially depressed state and my job at the "liberry" was, again, not exactly lucrative. However, for the past year and a half, the wife has been a practicing physician. And while that's certainly not as lucrative a job as most people think it is, (one word of advice to future docs whose goal it is to make a buttload of money: specialize) vacation impulse purchases are not so much of a problem.

Probably the best example of this, for me, was when we came to a shop in the mall selling cigar box guitars. I'd seen the tiny shop earlier during my solo run and thought it was interesting, but it was closed. And it had remained closed even when the wife and I passed by again. Then, while browsing a different store two shop spaces down, I heard the most wonderful music and followed it back to the shop where the proprietor was playing away on one of the cigar box guitars. The method he was using was to rest the guitar on the table in front of him, its neck nestled in a cloth-lined notch cut into a block of wood, then strum the strings with his right hand while his left hand held a three-inch section of copper pipe, which he used as a slide, moving up and down the strings to change the notes in the chord. For a three stringed instrument, there was a lot of complex sound pouring out of this one, cigar-box or not. He also clearly had a lot of skill at it.

I stood and listened for a bit, then went and fetched the wife. After he'd finished playing, we struck up a conversation with the man and soon learned that the shop was kind of a side project to another job he and his wife had running a candy store in the mall itself. He made all the guitars himself, buying his cigar boxes from a lady in another state whose house was apparently filled floor to ceiling with boxes. I suggested that this seemed to be a case of a positive hoarder, though this is just my theory.

Now, I'd seen cigar box guitars before, but had never given them much thought. But the shop owner explained their significance in early blues in the Mississippi delta, as well as in Appalachia. Suddenly, owning such a historic and beautiful instrument (despite the fact that I can't yet play it) seemed a no-brainer.

"Which one do you want?" the wife asked. I picked out a guitar with a glossy red neck, made from a gorgeous wooden Manolete cigar box. He pulled it from the wall and played it for me to show me how great it sounded. It certainly did.

"Happy anniversary," the wife said.

I still haven't learned to play it, of course, but thing it's all around awesome all the same.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Anniversary Adventures (Part 3)

A few days before we left for Gatlinburg, which would make it a few days before our anniversary, I surprised the wife with her anniversary present. Now you might think that the trip to Gatlinburg was the present. And, originally, that had been the intention. But, as I chronicled back in August, the wife, as usual, figured it out barely two weeks after I'd made the reservation, and without seeing the credit card statement. I was not to be outdone, though. Two weeks before our actual anniversary I ordered her something a little bit smaller than a trip to Gatlinburg, but something she'd wanted for YEARS, but which we'd not really been able to afford. It was, perhaps, the perfect gift, but I can't take complete credit for thinking of it.

Each year in a marriage is supposed to be marked by a traditional gift made from a certain material. We all know that the 50th anniversary is supposed to be gold and 25th is silver, but without research it gets a bit more murky below that. We used to joke that the 5th year anniversary was probably something like paper plates, and this is not too far off, as it's wood. The wife and I haven't really paid any attention to these gift categories, though, but I decided to see what the 10 year mark gift was in order to find inspiration. Turns out it's tin or aluminum. Being only 2 weeks from the anniversary day, though, I decided to shop exclusively locally or via Amazon.com where I have free Amazon Prime trial through March. I did a search for "tin" and immediately found the perfect gift: a magnetic spice rack.

Now, I know what you're thinking, "Dude, that's hardly a romantic gift. I mean, kitchenware? Really?" To this I say, "Is too! So, shut it!" See, the wife is a very good cook and knows from spices beyond salt and pepper, having been trained by some Indian friends in their use. This being the case, our spice cabinet has three full shelves that are constantly glutted with jars of spices, not to mention the others that are stored in the freezer. A few years ago, back when we lived in Tri-Metro, the wife saw a magnetic spice rack set on Food Network and fell in love with it. The concept is pretty simple, consisting of a stainless steel sheet on which magnet-backed stainless steel spice tins can be adhered, each opening with a twist to allow for easy spice sprinkling. Trouble is, they're not exactly cheap and, being poor college students for nigh on the past decade, we could never quite justify the expense. Seeing it come up when I searched for tin, though, seemed like a good sign. (Never mind that there's neither tin nor aluminum in them, but merely the presence of the word "tin" in the description--I think I win on a technicality.)

I ordered it, hid it upon its arrival and waited. I knew I wanted to surprise her with it before we left for our trip, but could never find a good time to install it. The day it arrived, I was going to be out of town until late. The following day the wife had off, except for having to pop in to work, but she made me take her, so I couldn't put it up then. That afternoon, I had to go pick up my parents and sister for their visit and then she was around us all for the rest of the weekend. Then, on Sunday night, the wife announced she was popping out to Wally World to pick up a few things and left the rest of us watching TV. She'd been gone for 10 minutes before I realized my opportunity.

"I think I'm going to put up the spice rack," I told my sister, the only other person who knew about the gift. "I'm going to need help."

"Go for it," she said.

At that point, though, I would be extremely pressed for time, as Wally World is really just down the road. I nearly broke my ass running down the garage steps to fetch the rack and the tools I'd need to put it up. While I measured, eyeballed, leveled and pencil-marked the proper place for it on the wall above the stove--a space that had been crying out for something like this since we moved in--the sister and my step-mother tore all the plastic off of the spice tins. It was not a perfect installation, because the screw anchors for two of the bottom screws wouldn't sink into the wall properly and then buckled under my attempt to hammer them in. I wound up just installing the rest of the screws, deciding to come back for the others later. In the end, it looked fine. We chunked the tins onto it arranged them pleasingly, then fled back to the living room to continue our movie.

The wife came home, groceries in hand. She walked into the kitchen to put them away and then paused. I crept behind her and watched as she stood and stared at the shining tins of the spice rack. It was perfect and, more importantly, a complete surprise.

"But I didn't get anything for you," she said.

"This is for us," I said.

"The trip is for us," she said.

"That, too."

She would, however, get me back.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Anniversary Adventures (Part 2)

Arriving in Gatlinburg on Thursday evening meant we pretty much had an extra day on our hands for Friday that we wouldn't have had if things gone to our original plan. We thought this was awesome and soon headed out into the rainy Friday weather to find ourselves some breakfast, choosing a flapjack establishment that had caught our eye the previous evening. I don't know if this was one we had eaten at during our trip 10 years back, but the food and service were good and soon we were filled with flapjacks and bacon.

We looked over a few of the pamphlets advertising some of the shows available to see in Pigeon Forge and began making a list of things we'd like to do and see. But because we had this "extra" day on our hands, we decided to just take things at a leisurely pace. So often vacations can be even more hectic than everyday life, with deadlines to meet if you want to fit in all the things you want to do. As far as we could tell, though, our only real deadline was getting back to Borderland by 2p on Monday, so the vet didn't charge us an extra day for jailing our dogs. Our philosophy became, as the wife says, "If you feel froggy, jump."

After breakfast, we drove closer to the downtown area where we spotted a bead shop in one of the store-clusters present throughout downtown Gburg. The wife is a jewelry-maker in her few spare moments and adores nothing more than spending hours in bead stores imagining the potential things she will create. She warned me that I might as well leave her there unless I too wanted to look at beads. I did not, so I fled, but no other shops in that particular store cluster were open. I hoped this didn't bode ill for the weekend. During our previous visit to Gatlinburg, we'd found a great many of the stores and restaurants to be closed for the off-season and those that were open (the flapjack establishments) often closed after lunch. We'd been forced to eat more than one Gatlinburg meal in what has become known in our household as "the shitty Shoney's." I don't know if the place is still shitty, but we didn't have a good time there 10 years ago and were in no hurry to return. Turned out, though, that this particular shut-down shop cluster was one of the only such ones we saw during the trip. It was located on the outer edge of the touristy area, and as you approached the center of said area the shops were all open (at least, after 11a) and seemingly doing decent business.

Through the semi-rainy, blustery cold, I made my way past Cooter's Dukes of Hazzard Museum (presumably owned or endorsed by Ben Jones, who played the character) then the Ripley's Aquarium until I came to a multi-leveled mall we'd visited 10 years back. I seemed to recall a decent music store there and I quickly found it on the first level. They even had Beirut's "Gulag Orkestar" CD I'd been looking for. Further up the levels, I came to a tobacconist where I decided it would be prudent to purchase a cigar. I explained to the man that I don't regularly smoke cigars, but do have one on special occasions and this weekend certainly qualified. He led me into the humidor and graciously did not attempt to get me buy anything obscenely expensive, but instead directed me to some of their milder, starter-cigars in the $6 range. I could just see myself back at the cabin, standing on the rear deck, cigar in mouth, beer in hand, a snow-covered Smoky Mountain tableau spread before me, hottub at the ready, warm wife of 10 years at my side. My purchase of said cigar, however, was to eventually prove a fateful decision.

My next and more immediately demonstrable fateful decision came after I'd picked up the wife at the bead store and returned with her to the mall to wander. We came to the Pepper Palace, purveyor of all things hot sauce. One of their sauces is called the Hottest Sauce in the Universe and Pepper Palace has a challenge for it whereby if you take a taste of it and survive, they'll take your picture and put you on the online Wall of Flame. Now, this sauce is rated at merely 3,500,000 Scoville units and allegedly the hottest sauce chemically possible is around 16 million, so it's technically a misnomer. However, I didn't know any of that going into it. I just knew that my historically evil wife had challenged me to the task and I figured "How bad could it be?"

At first, I wasn't even interested in the photo part of it and was about to have a taste without alerting the clerk, but the wife insisted I let her know first. I'm glad of it, because let me tell you after downing a corn chip one corner of which was liberally dunked in the Hottest Sauce in the Universe, I deserve every bit of that picture. Hell, I deserve a T-shirt! At first bite, the sauce wasn't all that impressive. It was spicy, sure, but didn't immediately kick you in the stomach. The clerk just grinned at me and said, "It's a grower." That's when I realized that the sauce didn't need to kick me in the stomach, because it had already kicked me in the nuts. Squar'. And, just like getting kicked squar' in the nuts, the pain wasn't going to hit all at once, but would grow and grow and grow over the course of several minutes. By the time the clerk snapped my picture, it was all I could do not to bolt for the coin fountain bubbling nearby.

The clerk grinned in the wife's direction and said, "Yep, he's gonna be feeling that for a half-hour, I'd say."

"I'm gonna need something. Quick," I told the wife.

Naturally, the Pepper Palace didn't have jugs of milk at the ready, so I booked it for a hotdog place where I ordered the largest fountain drink Diet Coke they had and supped deep. It was sort of like throwing water on a grease fire. There was the briefest of subsidences of pain as the cool liquid crossed it, but then it flared up even taller.

True to the clerk's prediction, it took about half an hour for the pain to go away, though it did diminish to a dull and kind of enjoyable level after only 15 minutes or so. It might not truly be the Hottest Sauce in the Universe, but it's about as hot as I want to get.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Anniversary Adventures (Part 1)

This past weekend, the wife and I made good on my formerly secret plan from last August to return to our honeymoon cabin in Gatlinburg, TN, for a mini-vacation in celebration of our 10th wedding anniversary. And while the weekend was largely an enjoyable one filled with great food and fine spirits (not to mention other typical honeymoon activity--AWW YEAHHHHHH!) it was not entirely without incident.

The plan as I'd conceived it was to pack the car up Friday morning, drop the dogs off at Doggie Jail, go eat a leisurely breakfast and then hit the road for G-burg, with the intent of arriving around the time of check-in for our cabin. The only major roadblock to this plan, however, was the impending blizzard that was scheduled to hit Borderland Friday morning and bury it under what was rumored to be a sheet of treacherous black ice. Thursday afternoon, the wife phoned to suggest that it might behoove us to depart a day early to avoid the risk that we might be trapped at home altogether. Sounded like a plan to me. I figured we could get as far as Bristol and get a hotel for the night, but she was all for going the full distance and checking into our cabin for an extra day. I got to packing and made arrangements for the dogs to head to Doggie Jail a day early.

We didn't leave town until after dark and didn't make it to Pigeon Forge until 10:30 or so, but I thought we'd made excellent time. The rainy weather for driving wasn't the greatest, but at least it wasn't icy.

The trouble with being away from a touristy spot such as the Gatlinburg area is that over the course of a decade they have a tendency to expand and shape-shift in the interim. This was especially true for Pigeon Forge, which had apparently decided that it no longer wanted to be a quaint little Appalachian town with Dollywood as its only major attraction, but instead aspired to be Myrtle Beach with every bit of the tourist trap crap that comes with it. Whereas 10 years ago there were some touristy places, such as gold and gem panning stations and a few miniature golf places, now there were seemingly dozens of sprawling theaters (one of which was impressively built upside down), gigantic prefab castles, and a full-size, building-in-progress replica of the Titanic. The place was almost unrecognizable.

We drove very slowly through the rain-soaked streets Pigeon Forge (average speed limit for the area is 35 mph, though it sometimes dips as low as 15), then slowly eased along the parkway at 45 mph (actually slower in some places, because the four lane had been reduced to two lanes because a chunk of a hillside had fallen and buried a section of the southbound side of it the day before) and on into Gatlinburg.

Our directions to the cabin led us through Gatlinburg and onto the outskirts of town along route 321. We noticed that this area had seen quite a bit more expansion in past 10 years as well, with more stores and businesses present. By then it was nearly 11:30 at night and we were ready to get to the cabin. Unfortunately, the directions for getting to the actual cabin had changed, taking us along a three mile stretch of road leading through the Arts and Crafts community before intersecting with Buckhorn road, the road off of which our cabin was supposed to be located. We could have reached Buckhorn via 321 directly, but we decided to take the suggested route instead. Unfortunately, we soon learned that the directions to the cabin, which had been written by the owners of the cabin, were factually incorrect. From the intersection with Buckhorn, the directions said it was 1.2 miles before we reached the road on which our cabin was located. In actuality, it was .5 miles, but because we were obediently following the readings of the odometer, we drove right past the road. And because we were coming at it from the opposite direction to a decade ago, we had no hope of recognizing it when we saw it--particularly since the road sign for that road was hidden in shadow, even beyond it being a dark and stormy night. We had to retrace our steps twice and finally go road by road by road looking at all the signs before we finally found it. And even when we found the correct road, I had trouble believing it led to "our" cabin, as in my memory "our" cabin had been located at the very end of a secluded, dirt road off of a scarcely-traveled rural route, with only one or two other cabins around. It was the very sort of place where you could walk around the exterior deck nekkid, as newlyweds are apt to do, with no fear of anyone seeing anything. The road as we found it that night, though, was paved, and lined with enough homes that we could see it was now practically a subdivision. Was this really the same cabin? Then we reached a familiar steep slope of road, one which my 1985 Chevy Caprice Classic automatic had been hard pressed to climb a decade back without manual down-shifting, and soon we were around the corner and there stood "our" little cabin--an A-frame tucked onto the side of the steep hill. Other than a new roof, its exterior looked pretty much as it had when we'd left it in 2000 and, other than some rearranged furniture, it looked pretty much the same within. Being nearly midnight, we soon tucked into the log-framed king-size bed, and snuggled up in the first bed we'd ever slept in as man and wife.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Laundrovations

Once again we've embarked upon a home improvement project. We actually have a handful of them planned, some which can wait `til summer. Among our scheduled upheavals are redoing the OTHER bathroom, redoing the auxiliary sink area for the bathroom we already redid last year, and doing some rock facing repair outside. But the one we chose to tackle over the past week was a fairly quick one in which we would redo the laundry room. While not the ugliest room in the house (the title of which still belongs to the guest bedroom with its hideous wallpaper--oops, there's another project for the list) it could be a close second due to its sky blue painted walls and peeling vinyl floor. The plan was to get the washer and dryer and storage shelves out, take out the floor, put down ceramic tile, repaint, and put all the stuff back in there before my parents show up next week or before the dirty laundry topples over and kills us.

As much as a pain in the ass as redoing our bathroom had been, almost every step of redoing the laundry room has gone very smoothly. We'd budgeted thrice as much time as we normally would have, because that tended to be how long everything took with last year's project, but we almost never had to use the other 2/3 of time. Neat. We even bought a tile wet saw to speed up the tile cutting process. (Actually, we bought two wet saws, but the first one, a Craftsman, broke before we even had a chance to turn it on. The plastic guide bar that is supposed to clamp across its surface proved to have a clampy bit that instantly shattered when the wife tried to install it. We decided paying that much for a power tool that would break before we could even use it was not something we were willing to put up with, so back the whole thing went.)

Once the tile was laid and grouted, we had to come up with a complimentary color to paint the walls. The tile was whiteish sandy colored (I can't recall the actual name of the color, but it had white in it somewhere), but also had faint hints of a brown and a mauvey sort of color veined into it.

"Seems like we could use mauve," the wife said. "Only lighter." I was skeptical, cause if you lighten mauve, you get another color entirely. Plus, the first "mauve" she picked out was really more of a brown almost exactly the shade of a Wendy's Frosty. The wife soon assigned the task of picking a color to me, as I'm the guy who's had impressive success with the last two color choices for our house. Even I had trouble with it, though, and wound up buying five test cans of paint from Lowes before landing back on Twilight Mauve. It's actually a lighter shade of mauve, which turns out to be possible to achieve after all. (I know, I know, it's still mauve, but I promise it works. Oh, and I know, I know, it has twilight in the title which is also irritating given the images from popular fiction and culture that name now conjures, but I promise it works.)

"Get a gallon of kitchen and bath enamel," the wife said, two nights ago, before I went to pick up our paint. And a gallon of white kitchen and bath was what I did pick out from the paint aisle at Lowes and then haul over to the counter where they mix the color. The kid walked over to me and I pushed the can in his direction, my paint chip lying on top of it.

"I need a gallon of Twilight Mauve," I said.

The kid picked up the paint chip, then looked up at me with an expression I interpreted as saying, "Twilight Mauve? Really?" However, what he actually said was, "What sort of finish do you want?"

This threw me, because I was under the impression that the finish was determined by the type of paint you were attempting to mix color into--in my case Kitchen and Bathroom enamel. I don't buy a lot of paint, though, so I usually have enough time to forget all I ever knew about buying paint by the time its time to buy more, so this could be some additional part of the process I had forgotten.

"What are my choices?" I asked. Kid listed a number of choices, none of which was kitchen and bathroom. I chose satin finish as that was what all the test paints had come in and was not too shiny. A warning bell still tingled in my head, though, and as I began walking away to go look at some other supplies, I looked back to make sure that the kid had indeed picked up my can of kitchen & bathroom enamel to use. He picked it up, so I turned off the warning bells and didn't give it a second thought when I took the gallon can he passed to me a few minutes later.

Of course, it wasn't until we painted the entire laundry room that the wife announced she didn't think it was kitchen & bath enamel paint in the first place.

"Well that's what I bought," I said.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure. I picked the can of kitchen & bath enamel from the shelf and took it to the dude to color."

"This is not kitchen & bath," she said. "It's not shiny enough."

"That's because it has a satin finish," I said.

"I don't think that's how it works. Where's the can?"

Now here's where I did myself a GIGANTIC favor and just kept my my damn mouth shut. My my impulse, you see, was to snottily and with tones of defensiveness, reply, "It's in the garage. It'll be the can that says `kitchen & bath enamel' on it."

This I did not do, A) because it's an asshole kind of statement to make, designed to chastise my wife for seemingly doubting my word, and which would definitely have escalated into a fight; and B) there was always the possibility that I was wrong. Being wrong would have been far FAR worse than a mere fight, because an unbelievably asshole statement like that followed up with such a colossal failure of accuracy would live long in everyone's memory, be recounted in family stories for YEARS to come, and haunt my every step, perhaps even beyond death. So instead of shaking the asshole stick, I wisely went to fetch the can itself to see what it really was. The label on it read "interior satin finish."

"You're right, babe, it's not kitchen and bath," I said.

Despite it being completely the wrong paint finish, it still looks great, as does the floor. And, fortunately, I got the major part of the painting done in an afternoon, so we were able to move the washer and dryer back in and tackle some of the mountain of laundry that had piled up in the intervening days.