Last week I started painting the living room at a friend’s house. Today I finished it. Compared to the other rooms I’ve painted there, it took–I don’t know–twice as long. It was bigger. There were more doors, more windows, more nooks and crannies. The whole room (and the adjacent hallway) took nearly twenty-four hours to complete. Phew. I can’t tell you how good it feels to finally be done.

I didn’t take a before picture, but here’s a picture of the room with one partial coat of white. It used to be brown from floor to ceiling.

Here’s a picture of the finished product. What a difference!

Here’s another finished-product picture, taken from the other side.

Today when I got home my dad said, “It looks like you got more paint on you than on the walls.”

“Accurate,” I said, only half-joking.

Y’all, painting is messy business. If you’d stepped into the room even two hours before I finished, you might have thought, Yuck. What I mean is that was dried paint on the windows, tape on the floors, and no plate covers on the switches and outlets. Plus I had supplies everywhere. But after getting two full coats laid down (and in some places three), then I was able to go to work cleaning up–scraping paint off the windows with a razor blade, pulling the tape up off the floor, screwing the plate covers back on, and moving my supplies. The whole day I kept thinking, I’ll never finish. But eventually I did.

Transformations like this one continue to amaze me. Five weeks ago I started working on this house, and whereas I still have more to do, so far I’ve finished five rooms. Five rooms that used to be all brown (or green or turquoise) are now all white. I guess the whole project feels a bit like what this blog often feels like–overwhelming if you think about it as a whole. A whole house to paint. Over a thousand blogs to write. But if you just do a little bit at a time, sooner or later you start to think, This is possible. I can do this.