Don’t Do Me A Favor if You’re Leaving Raw Spackling Compound on My Walls
Hello everyone:
You may know the Helpful Harry type- with apologies to everyone named Harry. He tries to do a good deed but it misfires and you end up with the problem. Let me tell you a story.
I recently bought a lovely home. I went through the pre-inspection one hour before settlement and discovered something shocking: The previous owner, in some sort of misguided attempt to be helpful, had covered every nail hole on every wall in the new house with spackling compound.
Now this might have been deemed “helpful,” except that every wall in the house was painted brown. (Imagine here for a moment that you are living inside a wet cardboard box. That’s the color he had painted all of the walls during his pre-spackling extravaganza.)
Now, I knew I would need to repaint, not being fond of wet-cardboard-box brown, but I didn’t realize that it would need to be done immediately (the man apparently had a bunch of pictures that had previously graced his walls, so there were huge patches of spackle on every single wall. Some walls had as many as six or seven splotches!) “Heavens to Betsy,” as my mother would say. Shoot, this was even worth her “goodness, gracious, mercy Maude” and my father’s beloved expression, “Gosh!”
While I was busy “Betsying,” “Mauding,” and “goshing” my way through the house, I also realized that, because the walls were textured and because he had sanded them, I now had white smooth sections of brown, textured walls.
The end of the story, however, is really quite wonderful. A very dear and new friend and her family came over to my house and painted my entire house. The horrid brown with white spackle has now been replaced with gorgeous light blue, light mint green, and pink (not in the same room or even on the same floor). It looks great, not thanks to Helpful Harry.
Best,
Dr. Sheri