So, in between visits to and from crazy family members, we’ve been busy over at the new house, getting it ready for our upcoming move-in this weekend.
This place was a bargain. Mostly because it needs a complete overhaul. When he wasn’t at work or talking me through family-related crying fits or buying me fabulous Christmas and birthday presents, RegularDad spent the better part of December over at the new house looking like this:
Just about every doorway in the house had large cracks in the plaster, like this:
So for weeks, the new house looked like this:
Not very pretty. And in spite of all the work we’d done, it still looked like we hadn’t made much of a dent in the whole project at all. Which made it easy to feel discouraged. (And I haven’t even shown you pictures of the bedrooms, which is a whole ‘nother post.)
But yesterday, it all finally started to come together. We were finally at the point where it was time to paint. RegularDad cleared the rooms and put down drop cloths and got started on the ceilings:
And of course, when you paint ceilings, it’s good to have a long-handled roller extension. Not just for the ability to paint ceilings much more quickly without using a ladder, but also because it’s good for those moments when you just need to stop and play some air-guitar and mosh along to some Machine Head in the CD player:
It’s good for morale and all.
And before you knew it, that dreary patched whitewash on the walls was disappearing under this fabulous golden brown I’d picked out:
And as he was putting up the color, the sun came out for the first time that day and shone on the walls just to prove that the color was good and golden. This was the one color I’d picked that I wasn’t sure about, you see. This was the color that I was really nervous about. But it’s going to work just fine. In fact, as more of that golden color went up on the walls, we began to feel better. More cheerful. More at home. There’s something definitely Western and Santa Fe about it. And that helps with the Colorado-homesickness more than I would have believed possible.
Pretty soon, the kids came bouncing and galloping in to see the walls, and to offer their assistance.
So, we’ve reached that pivotal point, finally, where all that prep work has paid off, and instead of feeling discouraged at how much left there is to do (and, believe me, there’s a LOT), we now feel warm and fuzzy because we can see how it’s all gonna look fabulous in the end.
We sat in this half-painted room for quite a while, just soaking up that color, feeling at home for the first time in a long, long time.
