A few years ago I decided to paint my living room, dining room, kitchen, two halls, and stairwell. I’ve got an open floor plan, so more than one color would look like the Partridge Family bus. I chose Dapper Tan, a shade darker than my first instinct, Desert Floor, but my artist friend promised I’d be glad.
I’m a pretty good painter, but I’ve never been the foreman.
I’m the one who said “okay” when someone else said, “You. Put this paint on that wall with this brush/roller.” But this project was up to me. I wasn’t the obvious choice. I was the only choice.
I read on-line. I watched DIY videos. I measured. I fretted. I compiled a two-page list of questions. Really. It included questions such as, “What’s the difference between flat and eggshell?” Really.
An incredibly nice man in the paint department at Home Depot spent almost an hour with me and my list, excusing himself to serve other customers but always coming back to me.
At the end, he said, “You can do this. Pour yourself a glass of wine and put on some jazz and relax. You can do this.”
I don’t like wine, and I listen to recorded books, but his encouragement helped. A lot.
Don’t look too critically at the line between the white ceilings and the Dapper Tan walls. And in the all-Dapper Tan stairwell, I used a paint brush taped to a yardstick to get where the roller wouldn’t go. It ain’t perfect.
But it looks pretty good. And I did it.
Maybe it helped that while I painted I listened to The Agony and the Ecstasy, the biographical novel about Michelangelo.
Contributed by Elaine Jack, Assistant Editor, Today's Family magazine.
Photo Source: Imagination Getaway
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