Home Improvement, Part One

That zany Reich family would have made an entertaining drinking game for anyone following along at home this weekend:  Every time you hear an agonized moan or groan, drink.  When one us lets fly with a crap, damn, hell, or other, more colorful expletive, drink.  Every time you hear a whiny, "Why are we even bothering with this, again?", drink.  When Brooke gets paint in her hair, drink.  When one of us (there's no need to point fingers) gets a little cranky and starts complaining, drink.  When Keith says, "Whoa, nelly!" (because, really, who says whoa, nelly?!), chug.  When the power goes out for twelve hours and the Reichs have to paint in the half-light from the windows, chug.  When Brooke knocks a whole pan of paint from the top of the refrigerator to the floor, chug. Play this game and I guarantee you will be feeling good in no time (or at least smug and superior compared to these two lunks)!

Yes, the Reichs tackled home improvement this weekend.  Specifically, we tackled painting the kitchen.  We intended (bright-eyed, naive, stupid things that we are) to paint the living room and the kitchen, all in one weekend.  But now it's Monday morning and all of our kitchen belongings are still stacked in the living room.  All of our furniture is still pushed to the middle of the floor.  All of our cabinet doors are still off their hinges and piled with our drawers in an unpainted stack on the floor.  Needless to say, we did not get far enough to start on the living room as well.  Painting is really hard, really time-consuming work.

When, oh, when will I finally learn that I am not cut out for "projects"?  I am not a projects kind of girl.  They always sound so fun to me in theory.  "Hey," I say to my husband, "let's paint the living room and the kitchen this weekend!"  Visions dance through my head of Keith and I, slightly paint-smeared and beaming, as we survey our freshly coated little kingdom and pronounce that it is good.  I never imagined the back-breaking contortionist balancing act of standing with one slippery foot planted on the counter, the other knee braced against the refrigerator, trying to even out a corner near the ceiling no one's ever going to see anyway, and not at all being satisfied with less than perfection, because I am a freak.  Why do I keep doing this to myself? And why doesn't my husband shut it down?!  Shouldn't he, also, know better by now?

And yet, we are who we are and we do what we have to do.  Tonight after a full eight hours of pretty demanding work, I will come home and we will put on some music and change into old clothes and continue to paint the kitchen.  Because it needs to be done, and because it will look so good and be so worth it in the end.  And because, though I reserve the right to complain about it at anytime, there is a (slightly masochistic?) part of me that actually enjoys the process of transforming something from old and shabby to bright and better.  Plus, I can't think of any better partner in crime/insanity than the one I've got by my side through all this mess.  I sometimes just can't help but believe that we can accomplish absolutely anything together.  We're already talking about painting the living room next weekend.