I write this as I take a break from redoing the walls of our baby room. And as I write this, Cheryl is busy planning her hospital bag, and Baby is tickling her from the inside.
When I was young, to my shame I paid little attention during most of my dad’s attempts to include me in his DIY efforts. Therefore, I’ve had the opportunity to learn from scratch a variety of skills to date: waterblasting, gibstopping, wallpaper stripping, painting, and so on. (In some ways learning how to paint walls in the year 2012 is vastly easier than the generation before. I’ve sat here to google each step of the way and learnt much from tutorials and videos made by people who have taught me what my dad couldn’t.)
Anyways, one of the things about a job like redoing a baby’s room is that it gives you much time to think, pray, listen to God’s Word, and so on. Scraping old wallpaper glue is actually pretty relaxing once you add the dulcet tones of Max McLean’s voice into the mix.
Yet through all this time, one practical lesson that the Lord impressed upon me was the value — no actually, the necessity — of a proper foundation.
I mean, the painting process for our nursery takes several steps:
- Remove the old, painted on wallpaper
- Remove adhesive from gib board that won’t come off without dissolving and scraping
- Fill divots, holes and imperfections with putty
- Masking tape on the edges, skirting etc.
- Paint wall with a coat of primer
- Sand down any imperfections
- Paint wall with 1-2 coats of paint
- Touch up skirting and other unpainted areas
- Decorate walls with decals and other bits and pieces
So far I’m already on step 6. Yet the mistakes I didn’t correct in the earlier stages in preparing the foundation have followed me right through each step. Because my foundation had speckles and uncorrected divots and so on (not too many, thankfully), these mistakes have followed me right through the various stages.
It reminded me of other foundation-related lessons, such as the parable of the house on the rock/house on the sand (Matthew 7:21-28), the description of Christ as the only sure foundation to build upon (1 Cor 3:10-15), and many other lessons from the pages of life.
Look forward to finishing this DIY project!
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– William
(Also another thing I’ve learnt: turps do not go down the drain.)
