Painting Rooms (Part I)

Since I knew that I had a considerable block of time before my furniture arrived, I decided that I should probably go ahead and repaint a few rooms in the house. And since I didn’t have any boxes to unpack, this weekend seemed like a good time to do it.

I was thinking about these plans theoretically on Wednesday afternoon. My mom called Wednesday night. “I think you should paint the bedrooms in the house this weekend, and I can come up to help,” she said. “I think I should, too; and it would be nice to have some help…” “Okay, good,” she interjected cheerfully. “Now, you need to go try to scratch some paint off of one of the walls and take a sample with you to the store. And you also need to get the paint they left you from the den and open it and put a little on some paper and let it dry so that they can see what it looks like dry, and then take that with you too. Ask them to help you pick out a color. Make sure it won’t clash with the den, since this is going to go in the hallway, but that will cover the grey in the bedrooms. Ask them how much paint they think it will take. And ask them about primer." (My mother has a way of making “theoretical” plans very real.) “Um, okay,” I say, scrambling for the Hampton Inn complimentary notepad and pen.

“Now, can you take off work on Friday?” she asked. “Huh?” I replied brilliantly. “For us to start painting,” she explained patiently. “Oh…well… yes…” (In my world, the weekend starts on Saturday. In Mom’s world, the weekend apparently starts on Friday.) “So, what you’re saying is that in order for us to get started on this on Friday, you need me to do all the Home Depot stuff tomorrow?” “Yes." “Um, okay…” I responded again, mentally rescheduling my entire next day. (It wasn’t that full, but changing plans with less than 24 hrs notice has been known to cause me actual physical pain.)

The next morning I got up, went to the house, gathered my respective paint samples and headed off to Home Depot. I’d never had to make paint decisions before, so the Bree Vandekamp in me was a little concerned. But going to Home Depot looks so fun in their commercials and my mom assured me that they would know what to do. (Mom had clearly seen the same Home Depot commercials as I had.) I walked up to the paint counter, explained my situation to the person there, and she looked at me like a deer in the headlights. She was very nice; but after about 10 minutes of my trying to guide her through helping me, I walked away with two books of paint samples that I’d already picked up on my own (but didn’t want to tell her).

I went to the office, overwhelmed by the abundance of whites, near whites, neutrals, and nearly neutral non-white paint colors in the world. Thankfully, one of my coworkers sent me to a local paint store; and in true small town fashion, Steve and Bryan knew my name, my mother’s name, and what paint color I needed in about 5 minutes.

Crisis solved. Now I just had to survive the painting itself.