|| 9 October 2016

Progress: Painting and Weight Loss

When a project doesn’t succeed as quickly as you hoped, it is easy to become discouraged. This is true whether you are trying to lose a substantial amount of weight — or repaint rooms that haven’t had new paint since 1971. Rooms which also have acquired a lot of settling cracks and other damage in the forty plus years.

But for eventual success, you just don’t quit.

You stay with the program, tolerating the interruptions and figuring out strategies to overcome the challenges.

When I completed with the dining room and then the living room, I estimated that I had about a week’s more work to paint the little foyer. Oh dear ! How wrong I was about that.

Of course when MacDougal, the old cat became ill mid-August and four weeks later had to make that “last trip” to the vet, his care delayed the work. Then I found that the small entranceway had a lot of problems. The old front door that I assumed was made from one piece of wood turned out to be 26 different pieces (!!) put together like a Chinese puzzle. After 87 years as the house’s principal entrance, the door parts needed reinforcing, especially since the paranoid-about-security previous owner had taken out the door’s 12 glass panes and replaced them with plywood. (And also had a tacky little peep hole gadget installed.)

Someday I hope to have opaque glass panes reinstalled, and one-way glass replace the little peep hole thing. In the meantime, I had to reinforce the door parts without doing such a good job that the plywood panels later could not be taken out without damaging the door.

There is a weight loss parallel here too. In losing weight you do not want to shed the pounds by a method that will cause health problems that will later make it impossible to maintain normal weight in the long run. That’s why I always recommend shedding those extra pounds / kilos / stones gradually — if you want to stay slim.

Photo

In the composite photo above you can see (left) the living room archway into the small foyer before I began the work. (Not sure why the chair is out of place, but you can still see the door.) In the center photo, the archway is painted as are the walls. The living room wall is showing gray — which it actually isn’t. It’s an off-white with a hint of tan. The foyer wall is a pale greenish gold to accent an antique tapestry that will eventually hang over the doorway. The door and door facings are primed, but not painted.

The photo on the right shows the current state of the painting. The front door is finished, though the door frames and the bedroom door have not yet been painted. The arch and the front door are actually the same color, but the light from a window is making the arch look a bit greener in the photo.

So that is where I am with my painting project. Some have-tos will keep me away from the paint brushes for the next few days. But eventually I will finish the project — if I just don’t quit.

Just as you will eventually lose all the extra weight you want — if you just don’t quit. And if you don’t allow interruptions and challenges to discourage you.

be chic, stay slim — Anne Barone

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