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The joys of home ownership are infinite. And by "joys" I mean "pain-in-the-patootie maintenance issues."
If a wife says to her husband, "I'm thinking about painting the living room," what she really means is, "I want you to paint the living room."
The husband might reply, "I'll get right on it," but what he really means is, "Right after my favorite football team goes undefeated and wins the Superbowl and publicly gives me credit because I am - this is a provable fact! - their biggest fan."
Some years ago, we built a new living room onto our farmhouse. And by "some years ago" I mean "in 1994."
I call it the Great Room because it really is a great room. We have our TV there along with assorted comfy couches and chairs. My computer desk sits in one corner, which means we were ahead of the curve regarding that trendy "open office" design.
When my wife recently suggested that the living room could use a new coat of paint I readily agreed. One paint job every 32 years means that the Great Room and my wife are both pretty low maintenance.
Besides, there were a few issues about the room that bothered me. The drywall had developed some minor cracks, and several nails had erupted from the wall's surfaces. These things were easily fixable and would probably take about five minutes.
I purchased a bucket of drywall mud and went to work. Every time I thought I had repaired all the boo-boos, a bunch of new ones would come to light. I mounted a ladder and closely examined the ceiling and found that the doofus who had taped and mudded its drywall joints had done a woefully inadequate job.
That doofus was me. In my defense, while we were building the Great Room, I was also trying to operate a dairy farm, milking 80 Holsteins twice a day, feeding the cows and the calves, putting up hay and... I'm sorry, just typing all of that is exhausting.
We hired a carpenter named Todd to pour the foundation, construct the framing, and hang the drywall. Todd's brother-in-law Maurice came out to help.
Maurice was a really nice guy who happened to own a newfangled doodad called a nail gun. Our youngest son, who was ten years old at the time, was fascinated by the nail gun. He hung around Maurice and watched him work. Maurice soon asked the boy, "Would you like to try the nail gun?" The lad reacted in a manner similar to someone who had just won the Powerball.
Maurice held the nail gun against a piece of framing and told our son, "OK, nail it!" He pulled the trigger; the nail gun emitted a satisfying "Whump!" and two chunks of lumber were instantly joined.
That boy has long since grown up and is now a project controls director for a major big construction company. Did Maurice's cool power tool have something to do with the kid choosing that particular career path? I think the experience might have nailed it down for him.
The repairs that I had estimated would consume five minutes took a couple of days to complete. I'm just speculating, but that might not be the first time in the history of construction that a job came in overbudget and overdue.
Then came the actual painting. We don't have much extra space in our house, so I initiated a procedure wherein I'd move a piece of furniture toward the center of the room, paint the wall, let the paint dry, and move the furniture back. Rinse and repeat.
My computer desk hadn't been moved for more than a decade. Behind it I found a complex ecosystem of dust bunnies and cobwebs. And cat hair! There was cat hair almost everywhere, including under my computer keyboard. Sparkles, our cat, sheds enough fur in a week to construct an entire new cat.
Last but not by no means least was the ceiling. The Great Room has a vaulted ceiling, which looks really nifty. But it also means that there were approximately ten acres of ceiling that needed to be painted.
Who needs yoga or aerobics when you can hang from a tall ladder and press a heavy paint roller against a vaulted ceiling? If that sort of thing were offered in the form of a class, its participants would quickly develop a physique similar to that of He-Man.
I should have thought of that before I began this project! I bet a lot of guys would have paid good money for the privilege of painting. I could call my new enterprise the Tom Sawyer Total Body Fitness Method.