I am working through the very long process of making over one room in our house. (I’ll be posting pictures soon.) The room is maybe 7 or 8 months in the works and has taken forever. Hold ups include my own laziness, me being distracted by too many projects, my own inability to pull the trigger and buy pricier items even though I want them and can afford them and me trying to find the right pieces to put in the room. But the thing is, some of the problems aren’t simply my fault… it’s just the way doing projects goes. Some examples:
- Wonder Boy and I painted some shelves and as I had the piece finally assembled I saw that the paint was starting to peel. A simple scratch a sheets of paint just pulled away. So I disassembled the bookcase and we sanded, primed and repainted them. They look great now!
- We have some old school lockers that Wonder Boy acquired pre-me. They are very industrial chic but needed a little work if they were going to continue to function as our linen closet. The plan: white paint and some shelves. The shelves turned out to be easy. The painting? Not so much. First we create a tent around the lockers so that they were completely locked into a bubble of plastic. Then we spray painted inside the bubble. In addition that this essentially created a gas chamber for me to die in, it also had no airflow and the spray paint settled creating a very bumpy finished piece. It was a mess. In the end we sanded and painted the lockers with sponge brushes and they turned out pretty awesome.
- I had a mirror I wasn’t using and I wanted to spray paint it white so it would match the rest of the room. I tried and it was going great until I saw the paint starting to orange peel on the third coat. Yikes! The mirror is being junked and I am in the market for a new one.
All of these examples illustrate what is for me the hardest part about creating something. I have a vision in my head, always, of the end result. This is nice in some ways because I have something to work towards. It can be awful, though, when reality doesn’t quite match up to my vision. And it rarely does.
I take this discrepancy as my own person challenge. I have to learn to roll with the punches. This has created some challenges for Wonder Boy and I. He likes to talk through everything but I need to process things for a while before talking about them. And when I am in the midst of watching a vision fail, all (nice) communication fails me. I am trying to push myself to stay quiet and remain calm. I am also trying to approach projects the way I would any emergency at work: assess the situation and try and come up with the best alternative.
It’s a work in progress. Like my room!
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