Most people looked at our home and decided to paint, it was a job for the professionals. My mother and father decided it was a job for the children.
I grew up in a house that was always being reformed. This is not hyperbole, it was literally always being renovated. Only a great DIY project that lasted 30 years. Purchased in the 1970s as a three -bedroom house and one floor, when I was born in the mid -1990s – the ninth of 10 children – the house was two floors, eight bedrooms, three bathrooms, a garage and a deck that could not be accompanied if you have fallen to your death.
The floor was a mixture of ancient carpet, naked boards (not layers barefoot because of nails) and a large concrete slab for all the newly – constructed downstairs it was – a huge luxury – heated. Several walls would be without drywall or isolation for years in a row, resulting in the use of the frame as makeshift shelves. I heard my mother’s stories spend all day on the crusher during pregnancy (or maybe it was my older brother), wanting to have the basement excavated before I was born. Another brother used to insist that he would have been louder if he had not spent his teenage summers carrying dirt and concrete hand carts for straight hours.
There has always been a job to do, such as using pliers to remove thousands of vinyl staples in the kitchen or concrete sculpted on a pile of free bricks to build a garden wall. After 10 to 15 years, complete summer holidays would be dedicated to painting the whole outside of the house.
If anyone normal looked to the size of our home and told him that he needed to be painted, I would say it was a better job for professionals. My mother and father looked at the size of our house and decided it was a job for their children.
First, scaffolding increased – the terrible metal frames that stretched five meters high to reach the gutter. Once the scaffold was on a wall, it would soon be filled with chapmans of all ages. Up to 10 people spread across the wall, performing the same task on their piece of boards.
If there has been a strategy discussed, it has never been discussed with me, but natural standards have always emerged. The fastest and fastest were at the top level, because the painting above the head (under the roof) is very painful. The slower and younger lot dealt with the middle section, which was usually the largest, and the children (including me) were on the ground covering only about five meteorological plates, but they also acted as corridors whenever someone dropped the five -meter brush or needed a garage paint recharge. Those who couldn’t really paint well were in charge of preparing morning tea and lunch for everyone.
Most of us would be from one end with the large brushes, painting any meteorological plate at their fingertips. On the other hand, my older brother and mother were in the windows like the cleaner edge cutters. Every day, during the 2001 ink, the 2010 ink and any internal painting in the middle, my father complained that the window painters were very slow. He could do it twice as fast, he considered it.
In 2008, we window cutters finally let him prove. He was right. He finished the bathroom garrison downstairs in half the time, and for seven years I had to look at oscillating purple lines through the window every time I showered.
The great painting that the summer of my childhood looked like a lifetime to me, but in reality it was three weeks, certainly a record for a home of this size. With so many of us, every side of the two -story house can have two complete coats in a single day (which happened because scaffolding had a daily rental rate).
There was a promotion running in the paint that summer – for each bucket of 10 -liter ink purchased, you received a free chair. At the end of three weeks, the lawn chairs were being distributed as Christmas gifts. It took more than 100 liters of paint to finish two coats, but at no hand -cost costs. My parents have never worried about gaining a quote from a professional.
Fourteen years later, newly applied at the university and a dozen refused casual retail requests, I really needed a job. When my frugal aunt complained about the quotes she just painted her house, I said she could do it for half the price. Did you know how much the paint costs or how long it would take to paint a house alone? Of course, not, but the thought of getting a fixed amount of money and a great task to complete with it was instantly attractive.
I estimated how much paint I would need, what equipment I would need to buy and how long it would take. I roughly underestimated all categories. I bought a pair of painter’s overalls for genuine reasons, not as a student party costume. Thanks to the history of our family with painting, I had a lot of equipment, tips and tricks in the sleeve. I made my little plans every night for the next day and took my small trips to the painting store for replacement brushes and top ups, and made my little lunch breaks and Friday treats. It was the most accomplished I’ve ever felt, but it came with some lessons.
Being Blasé, I painted a wall facing the east in the middle of the day, leading to a huge bubble on the side of the house that I blamed for the paint. When I replied in the sun again with a different paint, it happened once again. When I digested that you shouldn’t have wet paint in the middle of the day in summer, I sanded and painted this board four times.
At one point, I decided to hire my younger sister as hired. Despite being three years old, she is generation Z and I am not. She insisted on making the full lunch and refused to work overtime, finally decided that she could not be bothered by the sun and leave. Such limits served her very well in her career.
As a commercial venture, it was a disaster. Even with my mother kindly working for zero dollar per hour in half of the project, I ended up winning something close to $ 10 per hour. And, however, it was the most pleasant work I’ve ever had. Without a deadline and work alone, most of the time, painting was peaceful and satisfactory. Each wall or window I finished was immediately noticeable, and at the end of the day I cleaned my tools, returned home, and felt proudly exhausted. On my last day at work, I stayed at the garage entrance and couldn’t believe I had just painted an entire house. In addition to the bubble saga, my aunt was a happy client.
This was my last paid job before traveling, returning home and becoming a journalist. It was also the last time I painted a house. Since then, I lived in four rents and each could have done it with fresh paint. But my heart is not in it enough to paint someone’s house for free. Instead, whenever my partner and I briefly had the idea of buying a house together, the first thing I look at paint. I always hope it has not been done recently. That way, I will have an excuse to hire myself again for my favorite work.
