Paint Day

As I left the house this morning, a painting crew was covering our furniture with plastic, masking off the trimwork, prepping walls and preparing to paint nearly every surface on the inside of our entire house this week. "P-Day" has finally arrived.

When we moved in nearly a year ago, we knew we had a lot of work to do. There was no interior lighting in most of the living areas, the trimwork needed to be replaced, we wanted to add crown molding, the doors and hardware needed updating, the two fireplaces needed serious facelifts, we had no living room or family room furniture, the entire house needed painting (all walls, ceiling and trim were flat white when we bought the house), etc., etc., etc. We set our budget and got to work, hoping to wrap things within a few months.

Oh, and we had recently discovered Jaime was pregnant.

I tried to steal a page from my parents' playbook and schedule home improvement projects around family events when we knew we'd have a house full of people. That way we'd have a deadline by which things would have to be habitable and presentable -- otherwise things might never get done. I say I "tried" to do that, not that this strategy actually worked.

Initially I wanted most of the work on the house done by the time my brother's family visited for Labor Day. While most of the new trim work got done, we still needed living room and dining room furniture, recessed lighting, paint and details. The deadline came and went without any more progress at all (sorry, Dave and Amy, that your kids had to sleep on the office floor on an inflatible mattress -- at least you two had a bed to sleep in!).

Then we thought we could finish by the time Kate was born in October. That goal was quickly amended, and I was able to accomplish the revised goal of having just the nursey ready for her arrival. I must admit that she has by far the most luxurious room in the house (she has custom-made curtains!), and she doesn't even know it.

Next, we thought we might get things wrapped up by the time we had a house full of out-of-town guests when Kate was blessed in church in early December. Didn't happen. At least the kids had fun running around in circles in the empty living room.

We then volunteered to host Devoted Wife's family for Christmas, once again thinking that the deadline would push us to completion. When I sold our old dining room set on Craig'sList, I upped the ante a bit: if the new table and chairs didn't arrive by Christmas, we'd have to sit on the floor for Christmas dinner. Luckily the dining room furniture arrived the day before Christmas eve, and we compensated for having no real living room furniture by buying an oversized Christmas tree and putting a lot of cushions in the living room for the thirteen adults and three babies to lounge on. While sitting on the floor for Christmas dinner wouldn't have worked, doing so around the Christmas tree seemed to be just fine. However, we still had holes in the walls and ceiling drywall from when we ran the wiring for our recessed lighting, and patches of various sample paint colors dotted the white walls throughout the living, dining and family rooms. I told our guests that we had decorated in the "early remodeling" style.

A couple of weeks ago we finally found a deadline that we couldn't (or wouldn't) push back. Our painter told us that this week (beginning today) would be his only window for quite a while and that if we wanted him to paint the interior, it would need to be this week. Using this deadline as leverage, we were able to get our drywall guy in on Saturday to finish the patching and texturing of the walls and ceilings (he'd been putting us off for weeks), I finished the baseboards and we started to try to finalize our choices for paint colors.

That's when we remembered that choosing colors just may become the wedge that drives our marriage apart.

This process has not been easy for us. When we first started looking at furniture and paint colors last year, Devoted Wife must have asked herself "Why didn't I marry a guy who doesn't care about things like this???" It took us about 6 months to agree on a fabric for our family room sectional, and more time beyond that to agree on the color. The fact is that I DO care what our house looks like and have a relatively strong opinion on paint color, furniture style and stuff like this. We've gone back and forth with various color options, sometimes thinking we agree, and then one of us has second thoughts and wants to re-open the discussion. So even now while the painting crew is masking and prepping walls, doors and moldings, Devoted Wife is at the paint store getting a few more samples. I believe she and I are bring our respective legal teams to the bargaining table tonight for the final negotiation. Based on our experience thus far, I expect that it will be easier for us to make crucial parenting decisions than its been to choose paint, fabrics, and furniture. If we can settle our differences tonight, we're going to volunteer to help resolve the writers' strike or perhaps the situation in North Korea.

Its probably pretty good timing for painting, given that there is no reason to go outside because we've had more rain in the last week or so than we had in either of the two previous calendar years. So while it can start becoming a bit depressing to have it rain constantly day in and day out, I just have to remember one thing: If I still lived in Utah, I'd be shoveling snow today.

Then I smile contently, knowing that in a few days it will be back in the low 70s, and life will be sunny once again. And I don't have to paint the walls myself.