The other day I was complaining to my pal Barbara that I was having trouble reaching a high spot. “I hope you are getting those tall men in your house to help you with your painting, she replied.
I stared at her in horror (totally wasted, because we were IMing over Facebook). “I would never let my husband paint in our house,” I replied. “Never.” This is not some radical put-down on my part, but based on 35 solid years of experience.
Chrissy Spoor Pahucki recently asked her husband to calculate the square footage of their kitchen floor. I’m used to deciphering bad drawings and I was perplexed. Chrissy should be even better than me at figuring out the inscrutable; she teaches middle schoolers. “I felt like trying to figure out the square footage of the kitchen floor based on Brian’s diagram was the worst Common Core math problem ever,” she said.
My husband is a very good problem-solver. He once built a duct that hooked on to our high-efficiency fireplace insert and drew the heat through the house’s duct system. “It worked perfectly,” he complained. “And people wouldn’t use it, just because it was ugly.” Ugly doesn’t begin to describe a giant tube of galvanized metal snaking across the living room floor. On the other hand, he’s the reason why this house runs efficiently.
I suffer a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder when it comes to wall surfaces. My husband is a good counterpoint there, pointing out that there is no deeper meaning to be gained from a flawlessly prepped surface.
See, I’d be insulted if you told me I painted walls like a pro. I think I do it far better than that.