painting project update

I started out the summer with an aggressive agenda: organize a rummage sale with the neighbor gals and paint the kids’ rooms. For the staunch organizer types, this would not be a huge deal. In fact, it would be a fun challenge. But to anyone who knows me and where my priorities lie, it’s a no-brainer to predict more chaos than usual at the Salonen household, as well as to question my sanity. However, the time had come to dig deep and reorder things a bit, which means making more disorder for a while. As a friend of mine says, “Mothering isn’t for wimps.” I would apply this to tackling a painting project and rummage sale all in the same month with five kids tearing through the house intermittently. This same friends likes bringing up the quote that trying to keep a tidy home while you have young children is like trying to shovel in a blizzard. So yeah, we are smack-dab in the middle of what appears to be quite a storm. That said, I have some great news to report: it’s not all bad. It never is. There is always good to be found in any situation, no matter how hard it is to see through it, no matter how wildly the wind is blowing to keep the snowflakes obscuring the road ahead. In this case, my girls have been saving graces to me through most of this and, by working together on our painting plan, we’ve hastened the painting quite nicely. I wasn’t sure how much I’d let them do. They prodded, I resisted, they tried making deals, I said, “Sorry, girls!” But at some point, I began to relent and trust. It started by taking time to teach them — how to lay down the painting tape, to go slowly and carefully, to choose a span of time in the day when you can stick with it for a few hours. With their help, we finished two bedrooms in as many days. I am amazed by their tenacity. Knowing they’d need sustained motivation, I insisted we save their room until last, and they are chomping at the bits now to get at it. But we necessarily had to take a break due to other obligations over the last 24 hours. By tomorrow afternoon, we should be back at it, and I am hoping by the end of the week all the bedrooms will be put back together and smelling of fresh paint. Then it’s just a matter of sorting through the piles of things that have landed in the living room and garage and deciding what goes and what stays. I’m hoping much more will go than stay.

All this to show you the progress thus far. We did agree to let Adam help with the last several brush strokes in his and Nick’s room:

Little boys’ room:

Big boy’s room:

Unfortunately, I have no “before” shots. If I did, you would have more of a feel for what we’ve accomplished. The rooms had gotten pretty out of control. The walls in our home were all white, and as you might imagine in a home of seven, a little grungy. Hopefully in time we can work on the rest of the house. I’ll be back soon with the final room to be done this session — the girls’ room. I will give you a hint as to the scheme — each girl got to pick her favorite color and each gets two walls of the four they will share for “their” paint color. Hmmm….could be interesting, right? Think of the possible combinations, and say a prayer!