Yeah, as I was reading I was expecting "so I painted everything in the house and suddenly the world went plaid". Heh. Glad it's a cleaver metaphor!
I did nearly the same thing a while back when I got a completely trashed El Dorado and was trying to see if there was enough life left within to make it worth attempting to salvage or not:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/a-275-el-doh-rah-no#post-3843740
Was kind of fun (and utterly shocking) to watch it click and clack happily away like that.