It's like frosting a cake - a giant, inside out cake.

They (who are these people, anyway?) say that skimcoating "is like frosting a cake." I suppose that's great if you're any good at frosting cakes. I'm not - I have recently been converted to fondant for my son's cakes, and I'm grateful that there will be no more mangy peeling birthday cakes in my future.

However, it's also a lie in another way. It's only true if you are used to frosting enormous, inside out, square cakes, with windows and doors, using putty knives. That would be me. I'm really good at mudding, taping, skimcoating, plastering, anything that involves smoothly spreading some sort of pasty substance on a hard substrate. Cake, by the way, IS NOT a hard substrate, and frosting won't hard-set on you like plaster or stay workable for a long time like spackle.

So to continue the theme, I'm almost done frosting my son's room, as of last night. There is an incomplete ring around the top of the room left to do. The part that requires shifting the ladder every six inches or so. I got tired (lazy) and went home. The big news, though, is that now that there are some lights in the house, I can do some work at night. What a huge relief. More working time equals more time, and I can always get behind that.

However, I get a little odd when I'm working alone at night on a project. My mind gets bored, and I start thinking crazy things. Like coming up with a talk show in my head about house rehabbing and how it makes you crazy ("Tomorrow, on Rehabbers Anonymous, we'll hear about how fake wood panelling is the work of Satan, and we'll interview a couple who divorced over their house"), or inventing bizarre superhero names (The Night Spackler!).

I think I need a radio...