We've recently bought a new house, one of those that is usually described as a "fixer-upper" or a "handyman's special." What this means is that it's a house with lots of potential… but that the potential is buried beneath years of dirt, grime, trash, old paint, bad plaster, rotten wood, and assorted defects that made the place unlivable for the previous owners.

We had a pretty good idea of what we were getting into… or so I thought. We figured that we could spend a month doing the major work-- while taking time off for Thanksgiving and Christmas, of course-- then move in, put our old house on the market, and just live in our new house while doing the smaller work that needed to be done.

We were wrong.

It has been two months since we closed on the new house. (And calling it "new" is a stretch, since it was built in 1900. "New to us" is more accurate.) Our first task was to build a fence in the back yard, so we could bring our two dogs with us when we went to work on the house. That was a day-long task that took  200 feet of lumber, an auger, and way longer than "one day." By the time we finished, we only had one dog… and the first time we locked him in the back yard while we went to eat lunch, he escaped before we had even ordered our food. (Fortunately, a friend of ours saw him wandering around nearby.)

Our next order of business was cleaning up the mess the previous owners had left behind. There was rotten wood, broken furniture, construction debris, and general litter, among other stuff. We hauled debris to the curb until it was piled so high that we couldn't reach the top. The next week, after the garbage men had come and hauled that pile away, we created another mountain of debris. And another. And another. Before we ever threw away anything that was ours, we had thrown out five giant piles of junk that had been left behind. And that's not counting the stuff that could be salvaged; I lost count of how many truckloads of old toys and older rugs that we took to the Salvation Army.

Now that the yard was fenced and the house was empty, we could start the renovating. The house is full of woodwork: fireplaces, baseboards, windows, all natural and beautiful… and all covered in at least three coats of paint. The paint had to go… which meant many hours spent with a heat gun and a scraper, then many more hours with a heat gun and a tiny tool to get the paint the scraper left behind, then many more hours with a sander, to get rid of the last remnants of paint and old varnish. After that will come the staining of the wood, and then we'll be done… with one room. And then… only seven more to go! (Yep, we're still working on that first room.)

While my wife has been busy with the sander, I've been crawling around in the attic. Something that the previous owner left behind that we could use was insulation. There were about 40 rolls of the pink stuff in the attic. Apparently one of the many projects that he started but never finished was insulating; he got no further that piling the rolls of insulation up in the attic.

So I spent several days unrolling insulation, cutting it to the appropriate lengths (no two lengths the same, of course) and placing it between the rafters. Breathing the 100-year-old dust, crawling through the 100-year-old grime, and carrying around the fiberglass insulation did things to my lungs, eyes and skin that I'll probably still be feeling this summer. I hope it was worth it; after all, there is no insulation in the walls, so we're keeping our fingers crossed that insulating the attic will make a difference.

We still have one big project that we must complete before we can move in: the bedroom needs to be sheet-rocked. All of it, including the ceiling, and did I mention that this house has very high ceilings? I've been told that the neck and back troubles I've experienced in the past are going to recur, with a vengeance. I can hardly wait.

But all of that-- sheet-rocking, playing with fiberglass, inhaling dust, dirt and fine wood particles, trying to build 200 feet of fence without once smashing a thumb with the hammer-- is going to pale in comparison to the worst of the tasks we have facing us. The worst thing we'll have to do is… paint.

Now, the actual painting won't be too bad; I'm not very good at it, but I can do enough so that my wife just has to make a few touch-ups to the places I messed up. But the choosing of the colors? A horror story; think Alien meets Predator meets Jason meets Freddie meets Oprah.

If it were just me, it would be simple: as long as it's not deep red, hot pink or smiley-face yellow, I'll probably be happy with the color of a room. My wife is a little more picky. For example, a few years back we painted our bedroom. She picked a shade she liked, and we painted. After we were done, she decided that she didn't like it, so we painted again, even though to me the colors were so similar that any difference was unimportant.

When we finished the second coat, she decided again that it wasn't just right. So she went to the store and got some more paint, painted a test swatch on the wall, and asked me which I liked better.

There was no difference. None. I swear, she had to point out the swatch she had painted, and even then I could see absolutely no difference whatsoever. If she had said "Surprise! You're on Candid Camera!" I would have believed her, because there was no way-- no way-- that the difference in color could be perceived with human eyes. But her eyes aren't human; they're the eyes of an artist. She can look at two identical shades of blue and say "This one has more yellow in it," and be right.

We're going to have to choose the colors for nine rooms, and choose a different color for each ceiling. And some of the rooms have moldings near the ceiling, so in those rooms we'll have to choose three colors. And my opinion will be solicited, even though I'll care very little about any of the colors, and probably won't be able to tell the difference between most of them anyway.

I think that's why I've always preferred the log-cabin look: no paint involved.