When You Give a Mom a Paintbrush

This particular painting tale starts about 5-1/2 years ago, when I first walked through what is now our home and fell in love with it.  At the time I had a 7year old daughter, and 2yo and 5yo boys, and we had outgrown our first house.  I have some pretty strong ideas about helping children learn to get along with other people better by making them share a bedroom, so I planned to put all three kids in the same bedroom from the beginning.  We painted the room blue on the top and green on the bottom, and I had a wonderful idea about painting white circles along a border right where the two colors met that I stole from a Pottery Barn catalogue, but the house turned into a big-time project house (in a bad way that we hadn't expected) and my husband made the brilliant decision to buy a wallpaper border w/ big colorful trains and planes and tractors.  I slapped it up, and I have to say, I loved the result, in spite of the big-time little boy look:

The only photo we have of the room back then -
and it looks like my daughter was playing with my camera.

We had another baby, a boy, and that's when I could see my daughter's days in that bedroom were numbered, no matter how selfish it was going to make her.  :)  But I wasn't going to worry about that yet.  So she stayed in the green and blue airplane room.

Then, about a year and a half later, we had a major house fire.  And it took a year and a half to rebuild.  We finally moved back into a much safer house in November 2010, with a lot of our major projects taken care of, but the new bedroom paint job was a mess.  Oh, there was blue and green.  But there was also a line of caulk across two walls (not even adjacent ones) where the contractors had mistakenly installed a chair rail and then taken it down.   There was unsanded joint compound spots just painted over, so there were dull spots in the paint finish randomly around the bedroom.  The paint wasn't even rolled on very well.  But I had bigger problems than paint (ummm, feeding and educating 4 kids?), so, for ANOTHER year and a half, I only dreamed about touching up the paint and painting a border around the middle of the room that would match the area rug I bought:

As you can see in this picture (besides the fact
that my youngest is definitely a character),
the boys' beds were still on the floor at this point - 
 we hadn't even made time to get them bed frames
because we were talking about getting
or building loft beds. 

This past December, we had my entire family (4 siblings and spouses, LOTS of nephews, and my dad and his wife) coming, so I thought I had better get on the ball.  I also reminded my husband that it would be nice if the kids were no longer sleeping on the floor and would he please get to work and build the boys those loft beds we had been talking about since we moved back in.  (I didn't want to be all alone on the ball.)  Then I proceeded to start to measure the three walls the border would go on, and started coloring little squares within squares on paper so that I could plan out the colors ahead of time.  You see, I knew that a good project starts with good planning.

By Christmas, my husband had completed the loft beds.  They were (and are) AMAZING.

Meanwhile, I still had lots of papers with colorful squares all over the house.  Sigh.

Finally, in desperation, I decided that I was just going to go w/ 5 colors that approximately matched the rug: dark brown, beige, cream, dark blue and dark green.  I bought them.  I had a vague thought that if I needed light green and light blue (which are in the carpet), I could use the paint we have that is leftover from the "professional" painters.  And that's all that happened in December.  Well, there were actually two important conversations that occurred during this month, but since I didn't realize they were important until June, I will include them in my report later.  hah.

In January, I decided to start by painting the outside squares.  Although I had made many measurements and done many calculations, trying to figure out how big to make the sqaures, in the end I just decided to make them about the same size as the carpet squares.  I think I had some calculations to justify this decision (?), but then again, I had been drawing colored squares on graph paper for a month.  I probably could have justified turning my 4yo loose in the room at that point. 

I cut squares out of heavy cardstock that were about the size of the inner carpet squares, and set about trying to space them evenly across the wall.  I knew my squares weren't exactly perfect squares, or even exactly all the same, but I thought "That's OK.  It will look more carpet-like that way."  Then I went back and tried to make sure they were level.  Then I had to go back and re-space them.  And then I went back w/ the level, and . . . well, you get the picture.  I'm not sure where my ideas about good planning went to.  But pretty soon my duties as homeschooling mom were calling to me and that was it for January.

By February, the boys were using all of my paint stirring sticks as swords, in spite of repeated threats and lots of yelling.  On my part, that is.  Nobody had touched the squares I had sticky-tacked to the wall, but the thread I had put up to use as my level marker kept getting tangled in people's play and more of it was on the floor each time I looked.

In May I pulled all of that stupid thread off the stupid wall (after I narrowly avoided the long arm of the law, that is).  I had no idea where those stupid square drawings were and just prayed they had been thrown out and weren't part of the giant stupid pile of paperwork that now kept me from using my computer at my desk.  The stupid paint sticks had all been broken and trashed.  I knew it was time to get serious and show my kids that you don't start something and not finish it.  (Why do we adults come up w/ all these stupid great sayings, anyway?  Don't we know the kids are going to use it against us the first chance they get?) 

But of course things got a little crazier before they got better . . .

(to be continued)

~Stephanie