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PAINT

All caps. That's the voice in my head screaming PAINT over and over and over again.

Paint represents so much. It means we can hang the curtains we purchased months ago. It means we can hang art on the walls. It means no more boxes, no more piles, no more paint chips.

It means finality on a project that has often felt unending.

At work we were making trend lines of projected outcomes. I rather blithely said, right, you can never appease the trend line. It's additive to success and always demands more. You'll never hit a goal using a trendline that adjusts to performance because it creates a recursive performance and each new gift raises expectations.

It's the epitome of sure, but what have you done for me lately.

This house is that. Sure we won't actually be done, we'll have the master suite, the sun room, and the tile in the girl's bathroom.

But holy hell, what all have we done. It's been a constant stream since we bought the house and before that several months of me obsessively dreaming about and planning for the house. At each step of the way we've found additional work that needed to be done, nothing totally unexpected, but with each stage we opened up possibilities of what *could* be done.

Once we cleared out the house, we could demo the closets OR we could take down the ceilings and paneling and THEN we could strip the wallpaper from the walls for plaster repair.

Once we had the plaster finished we COULD start the trim or the floors or have the house HVAC'd or live in the space

It's been 30 months of if/then/now what statements generally involving tens of thousands of dollars.

But today starts Paint. Paint means no more if/then statements for a good long while. Paint means we decorate our space. Paint means no more excuses of 'yeah, be careful there, we're still working on the house'. Paint means we're wrapping up stage 3 and this will be our house and home for a good long while as we contemplate stage 4.

Paint is amazing.


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