The merits of work you don’t want to do.

I don’t care for painting. And by don’t care of painting I mean that when faced with painting I revert to a state of maturity that my wife has trouble telling whether its me or my 22 month old son who is in distress. Painting with a roller isn’t so bad, but the edges, the preparation with moving furniture, laying down drop cloths (knowing full well that even if the cloths prevent paint from getting on the floor, the paint will still get on the underside of your shoe, and you’ll track it right off the drop cloth when you go to the bathroom), and the tape.

I really don’t like the tape. Putting it up or taking it down.

You might think, “Yeah! Let’s pull that tape down and admire our work!” Except that you have to be meticulously careful that the freshly dried and still not quite stuck to the wall paint does not have a better bond to the tape than it down the wall, and promptly come down as a sheet of messy, damp paint. Even when it works, it’s not perfect. Some paint drips past, or leaks around the edge, leaving you with marks that you then have to figure out how to get rid of.

And of all the painting jobs, I believe that ceilings are the worst. That incessant gravity ensures that whatever is below the roller; namely, you, is showered with paint. Mostly in small dots that occlude your glasses and make you think your going blind, but also in the occasional glob that lands in your hair and is still there three or four days later, prompting the question of, “How did you manage that?”

I have painted all of the ceilings in our house. A few years ago, our furnace had a little trouble resulting in a puff back. An innocuously sounding incident that means your entire house is coated in a film of soot. And I do mean everything. The ice cube trays in the freezer had soot in them.

We turned to our insurance company who kindly had the entire house cleaned. They did a magnificent job, and by the time they were done the house was cleaner than perhaps it had ever been since it was constructed (Perhaps cleaner than that, contractors tend to leave a mess). The only exception were the ceilings. They got mess off, but they were stained and needed to be painted. The insurance provided money to have it painted, but we opted to use those funds to replace our furnace with one that burned cleaner, more efficiently, and actually succeeded in the job of heating the house.

I said, “I can paint the ceilings. It’s easy enough to do.”

And it is pretty easy from a raw skills perspective. You’re not designing a V8 engine or performing heart bypass surgery, but painting ceilings is not a task I would be able to perform for a paycheck. It leaves me cranky.

That being said, the one thing it does do that’s positive is that it sharpens the mind on all of the things you could be doing instead. I had to take at least one break to stop and write down all of the other chores that, while not necessarily fun, were easily preferable to painting ceilings.

The ceilings look great, by the way. We’re quite pleased as it was the last major roadblock to putting our house on the market. And now, off to all of the other wonderful things that need to be done that aren’t painting.