Painting the House

I returned from my trip to Muncie, IN. It was the most intense week I had experienced up to that point in my life. Unfortunately, I had to return to reality to paint the house for the rest of the summer.

Really, there was no good reason we needed to paint the whole house. There were just a few scrapes here and there that could have just used a little touching up. No, Dad wanted to do the ENTIRE outside of the house. This was on top of our regular lawnmowing duties at the apartments. The entire summer was nothing but work.

Dad tried to start on the house the week I got back from Muncie, IN. However, that whole week of intense activity compeltely exhausted me and all I did was sleep about 16 hours a day. Dad was forgiving for that week, but after that, I had to get to work on the house.

We lived in a two-story house at the time. I'm not afraid of heights, but we just had the one tall ladder and it was very heavy. I once tried to lean it up against the house and it fell over backwards. Fortunately, I was skinny enough at the time that the rungs just went right around me. I was lucky I didn't hit any of our cars parked on the street.

The first thing we had to do was go all around the house and scrape off all the loose paint chips. Then we had to apply primer to where we scraped. It was like having to paint the house one. THEN, we applied the paint, so that meant I had to go around the house three times. In addition, I got plenty of yelling and screaming from Dad that I was doing it wrong. Honestly, I don't know what he was expecting. At the time, professional painters were making around $10 an hour. I don't know why he was wanting that level of workmanship when I was only getting paid $2 an hour.

One good thing that indirectly came out of this is that Mom and Dad decided they were going to get Loyd and me new beds. As a joke, I asked if I could have a water bed. As expected, Mom immediately said no. Then, a funny thing happened. She said, "Well, wait..." and asked my Dad if we could do that. I was about to tell them I was joking, but a voice inside my head said, "Keep your mouth shut! You're about to get what you want!" It's too bad that voice doesn't speak up more often.

Certainly enough, I actually got a water bed that summer. I couldn't believe it. I continued to use that bed throughout the rest of high school. However, I only ever got to spend time with one girl on it. (That won't come until much later in this blog. In fact, it's after I graduate from college.)

So yes, it was a summer hard at work, but it probably kept me from going out and driving all the time and getting into trouble. There would be plenty of opportunities for that later.