This Ol’ House

This morning I begin the long and arduous process of painting our
living room. It is an already difficult task compounded by my lack of
painting skills. Worse of all, our house is old, which means lots of
crumbling drywall, and it's been owned and lived in by lots of people,
which means paint over wallpaper over paint over wallpaper.

So here's my sequence: clear stuff from the room, steam off the old
wallpaper, chip off the old paint, sand down the rough edges, spackle
the holes/cracks, sand some more, clean the walls/trim, prime the
walls/trim, paint the walls, paint the trim, move stuff back into the
room.

You don't take the time to do all these steps if you don't live in it,
or if you're renting, or if you're on your way to somewhere else in a
short while. Not to say that Amy and I will be here forever. But we
do live here, we're not renting, and we plan to be here for a bit. So
we do these things.

There are a lot of analogies I could make here – about committing to a
spouse, about committing to a city, about committing to a community –
but I won't make them here. I'll have plenty of time today and in the
next few days to think about these analogies and, as I toil over a
simple room, strengthen my resolve to work at least as hard on things
that are much more important and lasting.