Painting

For starters, I hate painting. Well, I hate painting walls. Back during the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I worked for a handyman. And since it was Florida and many of our jobs involved either being on a roof or being in a house without the A/C on, I had to be at my boss's house to leave by about 6AM every morning. During summer. We're off on the wrong foot already.

One of the aforementioned "no A/C" jobs was the first time that I was ever tasked to paint anything besides a model car or some kind of target. There were three or four rooms of a family's home that we had to finish over the course of two days, and since they were on vacation, they had opted to make sure the air was completely off. My boss wasn't about to acquiesce to my "cushy" lifestyle and fire it back up, so we got to work in a sealed house with the temperature baking us inside at a cozy 99 degrees and up. This was the first part I wasn't too crazy about.

The second detail requires a bit of background on my personal life. To put it simply: I'm a bit OCD. I'm not crazy or anything, I don't have to open and shut my car door seven times before I can get in. I just like things a certain way... One of those "ways" is keeping myself clean. When you're painting a big bare wall with white paint and you're using an old, busted roller to do it? Things aren't going to stay clean. "Things" are going to get covered in flecks of white paint. This is when I learned to not wear my glasses on the job, and either go with contacts or safety goggles over my spectacles. This is also where I learned not to wear anything that I wanted to wear in public again. Couple the paint all over me with the fact that I was sweltering and standing all day? Let's just say I wasn't happy, and you can see why the experience has stuck with me.

With that background, I'll get to the point. Since my sister started staying with us, she realized that she didn't have a dresser to put her clothes in. This being the case, she shopped around until she found a nice little fixer-upper at a thrift store, and I helped her haul it back to the house and place in our living room until we could figure out exactly what needed to be fixer-upped. Her first and more or less only desire? To paint it. So today we went to Home Depot and sorted out exactly what kind of paint she wanted to recolor it with, grabbed some painting accessories, chucked it all in the car, and headed back to the house. She asked if I wanted to help her paint it. Um... yeah...

But, naturally, I caved. I went out there and grabbed a brush and realized that when it's not blistering hot and you have proper ventilation and you're using new equipment and you're not just aimlessly rolling a glorified mop-head against a wall? Painting isn't all that bad. In fact, it can take something that looked rather downtrodden and left-for-dead, and make it nice again. Paint for furniture is like a makeover for people: there was always something beautiful there, you just needed to give it a little extra attention to bring that inner beauty out. So, sitting in my garage is a lovely little oregano colored dresser just waiting to have new handles and a new lease on life. And even though I wore my soccer shirt from 7th grade that's covered in all the bad memories of a great white wall, I overcome my fear and my angst, manned up, and found that sometimes you just need to give certain things another chance.