It doesn’t take long to paint a room. The prep does. Like filming a movie, where the set-up takes far more time than the actual scene, getting a room ready to paint seems to take forever. Some people have asked me to do more videos. Same thing—set up takes so long and I have an unrelenting 9-2-5. But maybe all of this is a life lesson. We spend a lot of time preparing for our big moments. Planning for a trip, say, or opening a box when your published book finally arrives. I recently set myself the task of painting the ceiling of a small room during the work week. That room had had a leaky roof that stymied two roofing companies before a third came last summer and finally seems to have solved the problem. The ceiling, though, had water stains.
Painting while on a ladder when it’s over ninety degrees out, and you don’t have air conditioning, is counter-productive. I had to wait for a cool stretch of summer, which thankfully came. Admittedly, I should’ve opened the old paint cans we had before starting the rest of the set-up. Prep includes a run or two to the hardware store. While doing the masking I found bits of tape left up from the time we painted the walls of that room. Even when it reaches the eighties taping around the ceiling can be a trial. Drop-clothes are their own species of madness. Radiators are especially tricky, which probably explains why some of them had paint drips on them when we moved in. If you’re like me, you’re always forgetting something in the tool closet/garage and have to keep running back downstairs to get just one more thing. Then you have to move the drop-clothes to set up the next shot. But once you get into the flow of it, the progress is evident.
The painting itself didn’t take that long. That’s the part that’s actually enjoyable. For me it’s part of the life lessons. My father, who was mostly absentee and often inebriated, made a living as a house painter when I was young. When I was in seminary I picked up a little extra cash by painting a professor’s office. At Nashotah House we painted a room or two in our own house. I’ve done a fair bit of painting since buying a house. I always feel a connection with my departed father when I do. Those who’ve been more successful than me hire others to do this messy job with its time-consuming set up. But like many other aspects of life, it’s really the prep where the learning takes place.