Monday, November 3, 2008

I Suck At Painting

yesterday, karen and i did something we have not done in quite some time... we worked on our house. in particular, we painted our living room.

(pictured below is our newly painted living room.)


too bad i suck at painting. it's not that i hate the act of painting... well... okay, maybe i do. i think it's just that on my list of home improvement projects, painting is always near the bottom. i would rather build something or install something as opposed to paint something.

in this case, the living room definitely needed to be painted. our contractors finished adding the second floor addition to our house over a year ago. part of the renovation process was fixing the living room beneath the second floor.

prior to the second floor, our living room had a sloped roof midway through the room. the room looked awful. i believe the sloped part of the room was originally a porch that got added to the existing adjacent room. when our contractors added the second floor, they had to make up the sloped difference... and they did with extra wood and drywall and all that.

unfortunately, our living room went unfinished... until now. karen and i spent the entire day painting the room. i think it came out okay.

it's weird. looking back, i used to incessantly work on the house every weekend. i'd be cutting drywall, running wires, doing plumbing, etc. i'd sometimes work so much that i rarely saw my friends. i remember one time, i was in the attic and my friend (pam) stopped by. as i was a mess, covered in attic insulation, i could only say hello to pam from within the attic.

as time went on, i've gotten away from working on the house. there is still a laundry list of to-do's for the house and i've simply let the list get longer and longer. even when i was preparing the room for my son (braden), i worked only on his room. i didn't worry about the other projects.

after painting, i actually felt invigorated to tackle the long list of to-do's again. i'm not sure if that is a good thing or not. part of me is excited because i want to finish all the other projects and actually have a livable house. the other part of me is not that excited because i'm afraid that if i throw myself into all these projects, that i will not be able to spend time with everyone and simply enjoy life.