You can see the shelves removed on the left, sitting on the wall shelf on the right waiting to be painted. For what it’s worth, the curtains will be replaced soon too.

Last week I told you I made unexpected progress painting - unexpected in the sense that I wasn’t really planning on doing major work but I started with one section and then I didn’t really want to leave the wall unfinished so I pretty much just did a little bit every night for a week or so and a little bit turned into a lot overall.

So I’ll consider phase two officially completed and phase three underway.

Phase two would be the side wall, pictured above. (Phase one is the front wall area where the workout stuff is. I told you about that part a few weeks ago.)

That was the majority of this week - I kind of divided the wall up into thirds and made my way down the wainscoting as well - fully turning the corner on that part.

This section involved moving the couch to get to the wall, and then moving some bins of old toys to do the same - you see a lot of those things piled up in the picture above too.

As for the walls, I had to take down a bunch of pictures that have decorated the walls for years. A bunch of Gary Carter pictures, my Billy Joel poster, a Shea Stadium 7-line station sign…good stuff.

I moved the Gary Carter stuff onto my office wall - Billy Joel and the 7 Line are likely to stay…but maybe I’ll put a family picture or two up on the newly painted wall. I think that’s what normal people do.

The other thing you can see in the picture above is now we’ve reached a tricky part.

First of all, we’re approaching the TV and shelving unit that we last painted when we first moved in - so when everything was empty. Now the shelves are filled with books and knickknacks. So I’m going to paint section by section - there are five - take books down and shelves out, paint, then put everything back before I move on to the next one.

That’s Phase Three, which I’m now 20% into, after finishing painting the shelves from that first section on Monday.

But the last step of Phase Two also involved painting the corner of the wall - which has the alarm system’s motion detector. I was going to paint around it to save myself trouble, but I didn’t like the way it looked after I got the first white coat on there.

So on Sunday I called the alarm company, asked them to turn off the device (for 48 hours, so I had a deadline to do this work) so it wouldn’t look like it was tampered with, and then I asked them to tell me how to get that motion detector off the wall.

Once I did that everything with the painting went smoothly, and the only worry I had was whether I could get the motion detector back on the wall correctly.

So far, so good, I think with that.

I am not sure when I’ll continue with Phase 3 - painting both sides of all of those shelves is a lot of work - not because they take a while to paint, but it takes a good 3 coats of white to cover the green and it’s a lengthy process waiting for all that paint to dry.

So we’ll see. I have a lot of baseball and basketball nights coming up - it’s not out of the question I get to another section of shelves this week.

But there is one other factor: in order to continue, I’m going to need another couple of cans of paint.