The Painting Party

When I was living with a friend in an apartment during my mid twenties, we decided to paint the living room. Because of the high ceiling, we had to use a ladder to reach the high areas of the wall. To prepare the room, we filled in the holes on wall, especially the holes made by our darts that missed the dart board. We used a combination paint and blue colored toothpaste to make the filler. The reason we used blue toothpaste because we ran out of the white toothpaste. The filler was darker than we liked, but it did the job. We started to paint the wall.

To reach the upper areas we placed the step ladder on top of the table. When we were halfway done, we had to move the ladder and table to another section of the wall. Someone had the bright idea of just keeping the paint bucket on top of the ladder, since we were only moving the table a small distance. We felt it would be a lot of hassle to remove the paint bucket and the ladder to just replace the ladder on the table again. With people on each side, we lifetd the table with the ladder on it and moved it slowly. With so many people moving the table and without proper coordination, the table moved erractically. In one of our sideways move and abrupt stop, the paint bucket on top of the ladder fell to the floor.

The bucket landed on the living room carpet turning it into a sea of white paint. My room mate, our friends and I was speechless for a minute or so. When we finally able to express our disbelief, my room mate provided a logical solution to the problem. He would buy a carpet to cover the white spot in case the apartment manager came to visit. Until I left to return to my parent's house, the white stain was still on the carpet. I heard he finally had it replaced when my room mate's Mom can to live with him.