Late-Night Painting

The night before we officially moved into our new home at 1509 Long Cove Ct, we had already decided that our one-year old son's room would need to be painted. The previous owners had the room painted a muted, banana-like yellow. While we certainly agree that yellow is a neutral color as far as children's rooms go; we really didn't like the color for our own boy. So, we found a nice, cheery green color at the nearby Home Depot (just five minutes down the road from our new house). So, I drove over to our home while the rooms were empty and quiet, in order to paint our son's room before the movers took all our worldly possessions to the house the following day.

It was well past eight-o-clock when I arrived at the house to paint. And, being that it was January, it was very dark outside. One of the neighbors walking along the street greeted me and welcomed me to the neighborhood. This made me realize that I'd never been welcomed to a neighborhood before. Sure, that's probably insignificant to some people. But, it felt pretty good as I prepared to move into our first home.

I carried all of my painting supplies into the house, turned on the lights, and laid down the plastic covering to protect the carpet from my inevitable drips. Somehow, I had the foresight to bring along a radio. So, I managed to tune into a classic station in order to motivate my painting. If you've ever painted any part of a house before, you've probably done so with music playing. If not, you probably didn't enjoy the task all that much.

With my paint brush and paint rollers ready, I propped open the new a-frame ladder I'd purchased from Walmart, which is barely three minutes away. Painting the walls was so easy and relaxing. After feeling so tense over buying the house for so many weeks, it was nice to do some manual labor by myself for a little while.

By the time I finished painting our little boy's room it was nearly Midnight. (What? It'd been a while since I painted a room. I was out of practice!) The color looked so much better than the yellow, scuffed-up walls that were there when I walked in the door. Our son's room was the first update we'd made to the house. And, with that action, I finally felt like a homeowner.