Happy Painters

Buying a house can be fun as well as lots of headaches. But the real fun begins when you place your signature on your home and really make it yours. There are many ways to do this: new furniture, window coverings, rearranging the flower beds and painting. I chose the latter--painting--to make some signature changes to our home recently.

For several months, I had been wanting to paint one of the living room walls and one of the kitchen walls in a complimentary color that matched the rest of the walls in the house. (When we bought the house nearly five years ago, all of the walls in the house were painted the same color: celery green.) I just couldn't decide what color to use: brown tones, green tones, gray tones. None of them seemed to be the right color, even with all of the color samples that I had brought home. I even had each of my daughters pick out a color last winter. The colors still didn't feel quite right. So I got rid of all of the colors and started over. Amazingly, the color I settled on was actually one of the colors from the first batch.

My next task was to convince my darling husband that we needed to paint the walls. He had just spent a week with one of our daughters helping her to paint her kitchen, so I wasn't sure that he really would feel like painting again. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: "Honey, I really would like to paint the walls."

Husband: "If you're really sure."

Me: "I'm sure."

Husband: "It's not going to look very good just to paint one wall when the corners are rounded."

Me: "Okay, then we can paint the wall all the way around."

Husband (grumbling): "I knew I should have quit while I was ahead."

Me: "Can we go buy the paint today?"

Husband: "If you really want to."

Me: "I want to."

So we headed to our favorite building supply store, Home Depot, and bought the paint and other necessary items. And then the fun began: laying down drop cloths, masking the areas we didn't want to get paint on, dragging in the ladder, brushes, and other paint supplies. We finished painting the living room and kitchen walls that I had wanted to paint, and then the conversation went like this:

Me: "Hey, honey, why don't we paint one of the bathroom walls? I think it would look great!"

Husband: "Okay."

At this point, I think he had finally decided that it's better to just agree and get it over with. So we also painted two (not one) of the bathroom walls. Four hours later, we finally finished, cleaned up the mess, and went to lunch at our favorite fast food Mexican restaurant, Taco Time. Munching on a burrito and nachos, I leaned over to my husband and said:

Me: "Hey, hon, we could paint one of the bedroom walls. The other walls didn't take all that long."

Husband: "Yes, dear."

I think he knew it was futile so it was time to just go with the flow. We dragged out all of the painting supplies, drop cloths, ladders, brushes, and paint and started the process over again. An hour later, we were done and the house looks great!