Housepainting and Writing

My husband and I are painting our house. Our two story plus attic, 2000+ square foot house. We used to have a white house. Now it's mostly white, partly Monsoon Green, which is kind of a cross between sage and celery. But it's getting Monsoon Greener by the minute. I think the hardest part was going through all those sample cards trying to find the exact shade of green we were lookiing for.

Putting together the 15 foot scaffolding we rented from Home Depot has put the adventure back in our marriage.

I'm not much into home improvement projects. In my heart of hearts I'm an apartment dweller, still wistfully recalling the little one bedroom I rented in the Oakley section of Cincinnati. Anything needed doing, I just called the landlord. Painting was not something I did. But now it is.

So painting the house has been a learning experience. I've learned about prepping, scraping, priming and mixing. But mostly I learned that it's calming to cover up the dingy white with a thick sumptuous coat of Monsoon Green.

The best thing about painting is that the more you do, the less you have to do. There's an end in sight and what you did yesterday is still there today.

Writing a book can be like that. It's daunting when you start, but with each stroke, with each word you get closer to the end. If you don't think about how much you have to do, it's a breeze.