It's summer, so this is the time for sunning, swimming, and... sanding! Yeah, that's right. Sanding. And scraping. And painting. For the past few weeks, I have been assisting One Holy Fool, on an irregular basis, to remodel her newly purchased house. Mostly, it's me and Dr.MAT chomping at the bit, eager to help in whatever way possible, but only succeeding at slowing down the entire process.
When OHF showed me the sander, I had never used a power sander in my entire life, but as my friend said, it is quite empowering. And I guess I needed something empowering this summer. In fact, what better time than this Summer of Shifts to power up those machines, get my hair a bit dirty, and sand the crap out of some maplewood?!
Well, that's what I did. Wimp and weakling that I am, I wielded the machine and sanded to my heart's delight. Unfortunately for us, we didn't have more maplewood to sand. Unfortunately for the Holy Fool, we were the ones helping with the sanding -- which probably delayed the process for an entire day! (Perhaps we helped One Holy Fool less with the house than she helped us educate ourselves about carpentry.)
Sanding was not the only thing HAT has been doing, though. Since OHF purchased a lovely home with detailed paneling in the bedrooms, great highbeam ceilings, a spacious backyard perfect for gardening, and tons of what we call "cathedral windows", there has been quite a lot of work to do. House is gorgeous, of course. However, a lot of work needs to be done, so OHF ripped everything out of the house, leaving only the framework, and began remodeling. With a degree and years of experience as a professional carpenter and as jack-of-all-trades, one Holy Fool had no qualms about redoing everything alone, with limited help, from priming to painting to sanding to building the entire kitchen from scratch.
This was/is the very first time that I've participated in any this kind of work on a house -- whether for/with a friend or a stranger (like for Habitat Humanity, which I've wanted to do for a long, long time) -- and it was slow learning.
I scraped paint, sanded doors and frames (by hand and with power saw), primed window sills and walls, and painted. I can't tell you how much fun I had doing all these things! Especially enjoyable was the power sander. So much power and force had to be applied -- in such a particular way -- that I was sore and aching at the end -- but happy. And, the experience of working side by side with others in order to beautify something was invigorating, rejuvenating.
At times, the layers and layers of paint would not come off no matter what utensil we used, but still, there was much satisfaction, I think, in planting our feet firmly, rolling up the sleeves, and scraping like mad at the colors that kept unpeeling themselves before me. White, dark blue, gray, sage, sky, cream, eggshell -- there seemed to be no end to them at all...
Last Saturday, I was lucky enough to see five of the rooms painted, and I knew that in some places, these newer shades of musk rose, periwinkle blue, slate, etc. were lathered on beautiful wood grain in some places and in other places they were disguising uglier layers of old, unscrapable paint. No matter what, the transformation took my breath away. I was seeing with my own eyes the new shining, smooth colors of the new walls -- satisfaction in a good, honest day's work. Or rather, days and days of work. May this old house become for One Holy Fool a new home filled with rich memories and deep blessings.
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