Trying to make good use of the last few days of having free time on my hands, I took what seemed like a quick little idea from an interior design magazine and painted our place. Three days of non-stop work and voilà, I'm the proud mother of three beautiful walls. Naturally, I spend the majority of my days staring at my masterpiece. That's a bit of what I was doing when we became two of the five million people in France affected by the blackout that hit Europe last night. When our lights and tv shut off around ten o'clock, we poked our heads out the window, as did most of the other residents on our street, and saw there wasn't a light on anywhere.
This morning, the power was back and the sun came out and we were able to continue our wall gazing- as you can do now, too.



Before painting, I used an electric sander for the first time in my life to get the walls smooth and paintable. The sander was significantly more powerful than I thought it would be and as I strained from side to side, my entire torso violently spasming along with my feet teetering on the ladder, I realised I probably should have contracted a will before starting this mess. Luckily for the walls, I survived the sanding. Now, the painting. The magazine said it was "a long and tricky project." What it should have said is "this project is so labourious, it will make you gleeful that you only live in an uncomfortably small studio apartment!" I did the walls totally beige and then, to make sure each stripe ended up perfectly parallel, I measured from ceiling to floor each 23 cm beige section and then each 20 cm grey section. Yes, each centimeter of each stripe was delicately executed by moi. Halfway through the paint job, I was saying "I don't care if we have ten kids one day. After this is done, I will never move out of this place. Ever."