I’m working on my basement…finishing it if you will. I want to get some walls up so I can hang stuff on them. I also want to get some flooring down so the baby can walk down there. I mean, she can walk down there now, but there’s something so unwholesome about raw concrete…I don’t know. A lady needs tile and throw rugs when she’s toddling, don’t you think.

I’m making good progress, but I have one ridiculously huge challenge I am actually losing sleep over. There are four support columns in my basement. You know, those metal poles that are full of concrete that hold up the center beam of your house? I don’t know what to do with these things.

I don’t want to paint them. They were painted in our old house, but they have this awful tendency to rust up under the paint and sort of grow tumors. Apparently you can treat the metal with vinegar or something, but I really don’t think the douche and paint approach is for me.

There are some products out there to sort of wrap the poles, but before I could buy them at a ridiculous $40 a pop (not including top and bottom trim work) they just jacked the price to almost $80 a pop. Screw that.

I could spend about $20 each in materials to build square columns around them, but I was hoping to avoid creating corners. My boys…well, adding 16 sharp corners to the basement is a sure recipe for an Emergency Room visit.

I’ve thought of all kinds of weird stuff like coiled rope or glass mosaic tile or some sort of textured not-exactly-paint-finish I came across…I don’t know. Too much time and effort and expense for any of these options. I’m at a loss. Ultimately I will have to end up building some weird ass thing to cover this, but really – why hasn’t someone come up with an affordable solution for this nonsense?

And just in case you were speed reading this entry, or not really paying attention acouple paragraphs ago, I have to say I think calling a vinegar treatment on the metal columns the “douche and paint approach” was flippin’ hilarious.