I Hate Painting!

 

By G. E. Shuman

 

So, last time you allowed me to ramble on about how I’m not good at home repairs, plumbing, electrical fixes, etcetera. For some reason, a lot of people told me they liked that column, and I’m starting to think that nobody likes doing those repairs.

This time I’d like to delve a little deeper into that theme, homing in on what is my least favorite thing in the world when it comes to fixing up our house. That thing is painting. There is no doubt about it. Julie Andrews once melodiously sang: “These are a few of my favorite things.” Well, sorry Julie. Home repairs are not among my favorite things. Neither are raindrops on roses, or raindrops on the porch I’ve been trying to paint this week. (It’s been raining all day, today.) Painting is just the worst, least enjoyable thing I have ever done, (if you exclude my one root canal and those four or five colonoscopies.) That’s probably why the porch gets a regular coat of paint every fifteen years or so if it needs it or not. (I’m going to have my 68^th birthday soon, so I’m heading into the home stretch. Hopefully, this paint job will outlast me.)

I’m just not a painter. The day that I paint a room, a set of steps, or a porch without buying extra paint to make up for the paint I get on my clothes and body while doing the job, I may consider myself to be a painter, but I’m not holding my breath for that day. (I have been trying to paint that front porch this week and got paint on my skin in places I didn’t even know I HAD skin, much less that I had that skin exposed to my paint roller and brushes.) THAT will teach me to wear shorts when I paint.

What is the deal with painting, anyway? Who in the world even invented that stuff that we, for some reason, call paint? And more importantly, why did they do that? I only imagine that to have happened in a cave somewhere, sometime in the very distant past.

Wilma: “Fred, I’m sick of the color of these rooms. They all look like rocks.”

Fred: “What? Color? What’s color? They ARE rocks. They’re SUPPOSED to look that way.”

Wilma: “Well fix it, Fred, or I’m inviting my mother to come live with us in this rock-colored cave. Go out there and find something to change these rooms. I mean it Fred!”

And Fred went out and found something to splatter on the rocks to change their color, just as I splatter colored stuff on our walls and outdoor wooden things, and everywhere on my body except my eyeballs... so far.

One of these days that porch floor will dry up enough to paint, but I don’t care if that takes a while. The good part is that I’ve already done the porch railing and our four big round columns leading up to the second floor. Those columns are a pain. Round columns, round roller… you get the idea.

Chrissy, my oldest daughter, loves painting. She can paint anything, from walls to beautiful creations on canvas. Chrissy is a wonderful artist, but she didn’t get that talent from me. She’s the family Rembrandt. I’m the family Fred.