To think it's fucking impossible to decorate when you have small DC?

[YellowYoYoYam]

We're trying to decorate our hall. I optimistically thought hey, it's just the hallway, it won't take too long, not that much upheveal. What the hell did I know?! It's got 5 doors in it - that's 5 doors to paint 3 times, 5 door frames to paint 3 times, and 5 doorways to cut it around 3 times. It also has a wooden staircase that needs painting. There is now nowhere for our shoes, coats, hats, double and single buggy etc. so these things are now strewn about the rest of the house. Going for a walk or a day out involves madly scrabbling around the house piecing together mismatched shoes and whatever coats we can find. Doesn't matter if it's wet and warm, if all we can find is DS's padded snowsuit, that's what he'll be wearing.

The DCs are two and one so there is no chance we could do it when they are awake. Painting for two hours every evening once they're in bed means it's taking fucking forever. We shatter ourselves on Monday and Tuesday then can't face painting again until the weekend. We stupidly started this when DH has resumed his summer hobby of cricket and we both had work commitments.

Also, DH is so slap dash, I went to my mum's for the day with the kids, he did two final coats on the woodwork and there were still, after three coats of paint, parts of the wood that had never been touched by a brush! Aargh!

How do other people manage this? Please tell me AIBU and there is something glaringly obvious that we're missing.

YADNBU - I've taken 8 months of determined work to get 2/3rds of our bedroom done & 3/4 of the tiny ensuite - am working in 30 minute micro sessions every weekday afternoon while DS is at pre-school & DD sleeps. With changing in to & out of painting gear & re-clearing the space every time I'm down to only 20 min of actual decorating per session. It's soul destroying & is taking FOREVER.

Is it possible to get some friends or relatives to help? You'll need one person to watch DCs, ideally they would take them out of the house somewhere. At the very least, you'd need someone to keep the DCs away from the people doing the work.

We've had some work done on our house in the past year. I'm pregnant and we have a DD who will be 3 in August. It's really, really hard with only two adults.

And YY to the pipe dream of cleaning. Glad it's not just me

I waited until DS was in nursery so I had to do it in 3hr shifts the painting, couldn't do it at night because of fumes and windows open whats even worse was the one coat paint was a load of bollocks.

Wallpapering OMFG never again will I attempt whilst he at home its like having bob the builder with running comentary up my back side but I was rather impressed with my first attempt at wallpapering.

Oh OP, I soooooo feel ur pain! I am resigned to not decorating for another 3 years. Same as deep cleaning, making over the garden, having a private poo etc. Our time will come!

Thanks again everyone, this thread has made me giggle when I felt like crying earlier this evening. As I posted in AIBU I was sure I'd get responses like of course YABU, I managed to overhaul my 8 bedroom mansion whilst teaching my DCs useful life skills like joinery and plumbing. It's nice to know I'm only human.

To those mentioning not managing to clean either, I have a cleaner! So I have already figured out that I can't do household tasks with small DCs around, for some reason I didn't extrapolate this to mean decorating would also be a nightmare.

I am heartened and impressed by all the posters who have powered through and managed to decorate a room during naps and before collapsing into bed at night.

So my plan to paint two rooms this weekend with 3 yo DS isn't going to happen then?

I've decorated a hallway, DC's room and bathroom since first DC arrived, and it is very challenging. DP won't lift a finger to do any of it, and gets huffy when I shout that the DCs are in my road, which makes it extra challenging :/

Yes, everything above feeding everyone, getting them into more or less clean clothes and taking care of them when they are sick is pretty much impossible with babies and pre-schoolers. Didn't you know?

Remember doing our hall, stairs & landing about 20 years ago when the DS's were small.
We couldn't afford a decorator.
DH used to take the boys out swimming on a Sunday morning & I did all the wood sanding & then painted it all over the next couple of Sunday's & week mornings when on DS1 was at school & the other one sleeping.
Then on the Friday & Saturday night from about 7pm to 1 am (& on the Sunday morning) DH cut the paper, I glued & he stuck it on the walls.
My god it was hard work but we just went for it, the last Sunday morning with the boys pottering around watching videos probably.

Most of our house needs redecorating. Bought it 9 years ago and just didn't have the money to do much. We now have some savings but just cannot face it until DS2 is in school which will be in 2 years time. Our house is small and if we re-carpet etc our living room, there is very little space to store the furniture plus we would have to live in the kitchen until finished. Getting anything done in the house or garden is impossible for us whilst the DCs are so young.

gingerpig, are you me? I could have written that! We've given up on the idea of redecorating our very tired looking house. Bought nine years ago and not done a single thing with it since

I am so glad I found this thread, I was in tears earlier tonight about our house. Doing up our doer upper (been here 18 months) with a 2 and 4 year old is currently driving me to despair! We've paid for some rooms to be decorated but we're now attempting the hall ourself and as no bugger seems to have ever sealed the original plaster we're having to steam the paint off first. The catalogue of crap things that we are uncovering here grows daily. Money for the work is tight and we're having to do what we can where we can ourselves. We barely ever do anything as a family (one here doing the work, one taking kids out) and our relationship is really suffering.

Oh dear, poor you. We've been in our house for six years and I did my first bit of decorating...this week! DC are 8 and 5 and it's only now they're at school I can do painting etc.

Can I just ask how everybody splits their workload during a decorating project? Do both partners muck in?

Not in this house. I do the decorating (once every six years) but that's because I am part-time and DH is full-time.

My DH is a decorator and It still doesn't get done. our hall/stairs/landing is atrocious (2 under 3s) but when he does pull his finger out to actually do our house rather than someone else's he's super speedy and it doesn't take him long at all. Our next dc is due in under 8 weeks and hes promised to finish the lounge and do the h/s/l for me.

Top tip.. Water based gloss/satinwood dries in a couple of hours you can do all the doors in a day!

I take a day off work to power through it, but I draw the line at doors. They're unpainted in this house! I will do skirting boards and architraves as well as the walls, but I'd get someone in to do doors and window frames (or just not do them).

YANBU we are decorating our new flat and repainting our old one....its a bloody nightmare. Please have my sympathies.

It was impossible, because it was still me who had to organise the meals and the washing.
XDH standard of painting was terrible - he'd happily paint over the dust on the skirting boards.

I remember racing back from dropping DCs at play group for three hours to paint one wall twice a week.
It did take weeks to finish the room.

Its taken me a month to pull furniture out to wipe the inch of dust off.

Ds is 17 months and very helpful. Not.

I emptied The Cupboard of Doom yesterday while he was napping. Took me about 40 mins to empty it, move tumble dryer in, move bookcase to where tumble dryer was, refill cupboard of doom around tumble dryer.

Then he woke up and it took 3 hours to sort a couple of boxes of dvds and cds out.

Small people make simple jobs seem like wading through treacle.

When we decorate I do all the work and send dh off to the park with dd so I can power through with no distractions. You need to be making better use of your weekends when you've got a big block of time rather than trying to do it in the evenings when you are knackered.

I feel your pain, OP.

We lived with no stairs carpet for SIX!!!years because our hall, stairs and landing needed decorating after it had all been plastered, and we didn't want to waste money putting down a new carpet until we had decorated.

We had to have it plastered while we were away on holiday, because no sane plasterer would even consider doing that job with a houseful of children and only one upstairs WC.

We had to pay a decorator, though. We never could have done it with work committments, and wouldn't have wanted the DCs to have been at PIL's for any longer than they were!

The only way to eventually get the decorating done was to ship the DCs, on mass to MILs for a few nights, she flatly refused to have them when they were younger, and so it remained as it was. Our youngest had never had a house with carpet on the stairs until recently!

Yanbu yanbu!
We chose a fixer upper - it was that or move a lot further away.
With grandparent assistance the two main bedrooms got done quite fast. I took ds1 out of the way who was 2 at the time.
When my mum had finished the wallpapering I came in to paint. Dh is a very practical man but can't paint for toffee, especially silk finish. Ds2 went off for fun granny filled days while I painted his room silver and stencilled in rockets.
DH went to use the same paint in our kitchen and decided there was something wrong with the paint. He was going back over areas he had already painted and as the very surface was dry and it was silk finish, it was coming off the wall. I finished the painting, but there's still a rough looking spot that he is responsible for.

He did do most of the kitchen fit himself, utterly impossible if I stayed in with Ds, he spent a LOT of time at granny and grandads.
Since the arrival of ds2 we have done nothing at all. I remember desperately trying not to lose my rag at DH over the time it was taking to finish off our tiny downstairs toilet room. I was pg,couldn't really help and it was taking him forever.
He kept saying there was plenty of time. I told him to just get it done. In the end I roped my mum back in during the day and finished the painting, cue whimpers from DH saying that 'he really was going to do it' and there was 'no real rush'.
Ds2 arrived four weeks early.

We ended up getting somrone in to sort out the small patch of wilderness at the back of our house. DH mumbled something about doing the fencing himself and I just laughed at that. Was more than I'd planned on spending, but totally worth it.
Lounge and upstairs hall and bathroom still need doing. They're on hold till who knows when now.

Yanbu yanbu!
We chose a fixer upper - it was that or move a lot further away.
With grandparent assistance the two main bedrooms got done quite fast. I took ds1 out of the way who was 2 at the time.
When my mum had finished the wallpapering I came in to paint. Dh is a very practical man but can't paint for toffee, especially silk finish. Ds2 went off for fun granny filled days while I painted his room silver and stencilled in rockets.
DH went to use the same paint in our kitchen and decided there was something wrong with the paint. He was going back over areas he had already painted and as the very surface was dry and it was silk finish, it was coming off the wall. I finished the painting, but there's still a rough looking spot that he is responsible for.

He did do most of the kitchen fit himself, utterly impossible if I stayed in with Ds, he spent a LOT of time at granny and grandads.
Since the arrival of ds2 we have done nothing at all. I remember desperately trying not to lose my rag at DH over the time it was taking to finish off our tiny downstairs toilet room. I was pg,couldn't really help and it was taking him forever.
He kept saying there was plenty of time. I told him to just get it done. In the end I roped my mum back in during the day and finished the painting, cue whimpers from DH saying that 'he really was going to do it' and there was 'no real rush'.
Ds2 arrived four weeks early.

We ended up getting somrone in to sort out the small patch of wilderness at the back of our house. DH mumbled something about doing the fencing himself and I just laughed at that. Was more than I'd planned on spending, but totally worth it.
Lounge and upstairs hall and bathroom still need doing. They're on hold till who knows when now.