The living room work is getting down to the brass tacks.

The ceiling and walls were painted, the overhead exposed beams now have a fresh coat of brown and the trim has been stained and waits to be cut and tacked to the walls. I had a hard time finding my paint this time. I went in and asked for brown and tan. “Here are all our colors, sir,” I was told.

“Are two of them brown and tan?” I asked. Upon inspection, I realized that the browns were stretched out over a wide space, ranging from the grey-browns to the red and yellow browns all the way to the almost black browns. Once I realized that good old regular brown and tan don’t really exist any more, I settled for colonial cream, which was applied to the walls, while the beams got a nice coat of autumn acorn. Colonial cream? Just saying the word almost made my stomach hurt. Some of the other names were equally cutesy, dusty sail, harbor sunset, lighthouse, gun smoke, whispering pines, and on and on. Somewhere a limp-wristed decorator giggles impishly while men across America head for the checkout counter with a couple gallons of misty dawn and winter moonrise. “Don’t the paint companies understand that we just want blue and brown and white?” Then I thought as my mind clicked into reality: Women must buy most of the paint in the country. Come to think of it, men seldom ever paint unless they build something new.

How many men do you know who put on a fresh coat of paint just to ‘enliven their color scheme’? You’d be lucky to get a man to even notice that the living room has a color scheme or that the couch and chair have been carefully color-coordinated. A man only notices if the chair is comfortable, who cares what color it is? Why can’t a green couch and a blue chair live side by side with a gold ottoman and orange pillows in the living room? Hasn’t anyone ever heard of equality? Men everywhere dream of a day when old recliners can live in peace through tumultuous redecorating without points being raised about their color or national orgin. If it isn’t at least 10 years old, a chair isn’t even broken in well. It’s all about comfort and freedom from decorative tyranny.

Anyway, at least the work really went faster on this last leg than it has at any other time.

Of course, the outside of the house still remains to be repaired and there are other problems that haven’t been addressed as well, but I’m not going to focus on the negative here. I am instead celebrating the fact that the work is nearly done. Now I just need to figure out what to do next. Given that my front porch is covered in debris and leftover construction items and my firewood is piled all over the place except for on the porch where I need it, I’d say it won’t take long.

As for first finishing the job at hand before starting anything else, a new thing for me, I must note that trim is my least favorite thing to do. It is difficult to cut accurately, it splits and cracks easily and the imperfections in a job are readily apparent. Who wants their every errant cut to be on permanent display in the living room?

I was talking with a friend Monday who asked me if I was still putting up trim with a hammer. “You can borrow my trim gun,” he said. Since I don’t know how to use it, I’d probably end up nailing myself to the wall. I better just stick to the simple finger smasher that I’ve been using.

Trim work sounds pretty simple: measure the inside dimensions, cut eight 45-degree angles, butt them up against one another and voila. However, with my simple skills and a saw, it sometimes ends up being less than perfect. I once tried the circular saw, but it seems to do more damage to the fragile wood. I don’t have a chop saw, which might come in handy for this kind of work. I tried the jigsaw, but it didn’t want to cooperate either.

It was the rock maple miter box that my father bought for me when I was young that I decided to put to use once again after a few difficult attempts with a jigsaw. Although its angles are somewhat worn and it is showing numerous nicks and dings from years of misuse followed by storage in unfriendly environs, it still meets the need.

I suppose the best thing to realize about trim is that there is no fast way to do it. You can’t zip through piece after piece like framing. Each piece really must be custom fit to the application at hand: open-faced corner and end cuts, closed-face joint cuts, 45-degree corners and sometimes even more unique angles. The bad part is, one wrong cut and the whole piece is trash.

It’s the ‘bomb-squad work’ of the construction site. If you cut the drywall a little too short, you just put a little more mud in the joint or let the trim carpenter worry about it. If the trim is off even by 1/16th, it shows to everyone who walks in the room.

It’s like the difference between rolling large sections of open wall when painting versus cutting in around a fireplace mantle. I’m usually the roller type, but I found with this job that I am beginning to develop some of the level of patience necessary to do close-up trim work, both with the saw and with the brush. For me, that’s a major accomplishment.

I suppose patience is learned with age, so I should be more patient than I once was. But it really doesn’t make sense, if you think about it.

If we likely are growing older, then we are growing closer to the end of our days. That means life is shorter, not longer.

Shouldn’t older people be in more of a hurry, since they have less time? Don’t tell that to the fellow I followed up N.C. 18 in the old Dodge the other day.

On another day, my hands might have been white from gripping the wheel in annoyance, dying for a place to pass that ‘slowpoke.’ I captured that term from a friend, who once told me that anyone who drives slower than him is a slowpoke and anyone who drives faster is a maniac. Instead of getting upset, I conciously opted to enjoy the opportunity to listen to the radio, look at the scenery and ponder a bit. Life is a matter of perception.

Another friend and I were talking the other day and he noted that maturity is shown when a man works harder at getting his car to last longer than at getting it to go faster. Tell that to every 40- or 50-year-old who ever went out to buy a muscle car, I replied.

All this pondering on the mysteries of life isn’t getting my trim done; but it does help waste time while putting off the inevitable, which may very well be the most common hallmark of aging (at any age). Isn’t that what we’re all doing?

Now there’s something to think about.

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