A big oops

Alternate titles: "Oxi Clean is magic," "I still need my mom," or "Why you shouldn't paint the nursery during your third trimester."

See, painting while big and pregnant isn't exactly an easy task. Cutting the edges is the worst part by far -- climbing up and down stools to work on the ceiling edge is ten times more difficult and bending over with a baby belly to work on the baseboard edge is insanely uncomfortable. The edges took literally three times longer than they should have and left me with an achy back and limited patience. I was so excited to finally roll and get it over with! But just minutes into rolling, I was suddenly far too hot in the 72-degree room so I went to the hall to turn on the AC. The unthinkable happened when I walked back into the room:

I kicked over the nearly-full gallon of paint.

The paint spread rapidly all over the drop cloth... and the carpet. A solid two-thirds of a gallon had spilled out before I was able to stop the carnage. Did I mention that pregnancy makes you (me) extra clumsy? Yeah. Sure does. Luckily, 90% of the spilled paint landed on the drop cloth, but there was still a good 18-inch diameter circle of thick, fresh paint on our rental home's carpet. I could have died.

I was a bit too preoccupied to take a picture of my spill, but it was a little bigger than this one, spread out on the drop cloth and carpet. Yikes!

Matt was leading group PT at the time and was therefore unreachable, so I frantically called my mom while I tried to scoop as much paint off the carpet as possible. She immediately rattled off a potential solution and then googled directions just in case. Google agreed with my mom (she's a smart one), so I blotted up as much paint as possible, kept the carpet wet, sent Matt to the store to buy a wet/dry vacuum as soon as he got home, and then got to work. After six hours of pouring hot water, adding Oxi Clean on every other pour, and vacuuming it all up with our brand new wet vac, our carpet was in the clear. Thank goodness!

I finally thought of the camera on one of our final rounds of Oxi Clean. That stuff has magical powers, clearly.

Want to know the best part, though? We had to let the water soak for a few minutes each time before vacuuming, so I decided to make the most of those free moments. I grabbed the roller, used the pile of wet paint on the drop cloth as my paint tray, and continued to paint the room. And what do you know? With the little bit left in the paint can, we had just enough to finish the nursery. Three cheers for that.