On Saturday, we took Darwin to a speciality vet for some extra tests on his kidneys. We found out today that he has cancer.

We were also told that he has already lost 75% of his kidney function and lost even more weight in the past 3 weeks. We thought he was getting better.

Though I know that strangers offer some of the most comforting words, I’m not ready to post about it. How could I ever express in words how much I love him? Or what it feels like when I think of losing him? I feel like I wouldn’t do him justice.

So what are a heart broken cat momma and dadda to do? Paint. In our pajamas (with gothic looking nail polish to suit my mood).

We’ve been itching to tackle the primed walls of our entryway and have had a can semi-gloss paint on hand for months. Tonight we decided to scrape our energy together and begin to complete this mess. We started with the chair rail install at the end of March.

We took a break halfway through to order some pizza AND we had it delivered. This is monumental because we’ve only done that once before- during a snowstorm. We didn’t want to have to dig out the driveway so we figured we’d order pizza, only to realize that we had to clear the walkway and porch for the guy to actually get us the pizza. So we ended up shoveling anyway and kicking ourselves for being dumb. This time it worked out as pizza deliveries should 🙂

We didn’t get to paint the upstairs hallway today, but we were able to paint the lower walls and chair rails downstairs and along the staircase in just an hour or two.

It’s so much brighter already! The paint color is Crumb Cookie by Olympic. It’s a slightly off-white with grayish undertones. We brought a piece of our trim that the builder painted to Lowe’s and had it color matched to Olympic’s no VOC paint. The Lowe’s employee was super helpful and tried a bunch of colors against the trim sample to make we had a good match. We brought home a sample just in case and checked it against our existing trim. Thankfully it matched. This all happened back in like, April when we bought the paint.

We decided to paint the walls before finishing up the picture frame portion of our molding because we figured it would be faster this way. Now once the rest of the trim is up, we can just caulk it and go over it with a brush and forgo the roller. Plus we obviously do projects in small segments, so at least we can deal with a plain white wall for a while if need be.

The painting was relaxing and much needed. It was such a small area that it didn’t feel like more of a chore than something fun. I’m very happy I peeled my watery face out of my pillow to join Mike and put a dent in this overdue project. It felt good to drop everything for a bit.

Darwin watched us for a little bit and gave us the paws up. Though he said he would have painted the walls orange…

Tags: Darwin, Olympic, wainscoting