When we’ve taken on big household painting projects, we usually take on multiple rooms and we’ve always hired professional painters who can get the job done quickly, in a day. This year we decided to let the kids do it themselves. We are not entertaining a move for a few years, so we don’t have to plan for the resale value of our home. Not just yet.
Initially they were none too thrilled to have their lives of video game playing and television watching interrupted with this new family project.
I can certainly understand. I dread painting as well and I’ve always avoided it if I could get away with it.
But we thought this would be a good opportunity to teach them some valuable life lessons.
First of all you can’t always do what you want. Sometimes life involves work we don’t want to do and involves time we don’t want to spend when we could be engaged in more pleasurable, relaxing and (in their case) more mindless pursuits.
But this would be an exercise in creativity, planning, and business communication.
We would give them absolute free reign to design and paint their rooms exactly how they wanted. They could do colorful paint jobs if that’s what they want. The only requirement was that they would have think about and develop their ideas, put their plans down on paper or work them up on the computer, and present them to the entire family in a meeting.
Of course there was initially resistance. There are many more episodes of Star Trek to watch, apparently. (How many damn episodes of Star Trek are there?! They’ve been binge watching that show for months!) When we actually got them started thinking about this through our individual consultations, they became enthralled with the possibilities. They were really getting into it!
Free to choose what they wanted to do, we simply posed questions about some of their initial, not fully formed ideas.
Do you really want the walls of your room to look like it was the site of a brutal crime scene of a serial killer? Is that the best you can do? Do you really want to wake up every day to walls and ceilings painted black? Sure it will be easy to pull off, but you are the one who is going to have to live with it day after day.
We began showing them creative ideas and started to get them excited about design, form, and functionality. We took them to art and paint stores to show them various tools they could for texture besides the paint brush.
We introduced them to the Pantone color matching system. We got them thinking about how colors and patterns would work with some of our previous years’ family creative interior design initiatives: painting pictures for their walls, making light fixtures out of recycled objects, learning photography and framing some of their favorite photos.
By the time the arranged final presentations rolled around, we were quite impressed with their ideas. One of them came up with a sleek, abstract idea vaguely inspired by the set of Star Trek.
Another developed a swirling blue and gold design inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”. The third involved star stencils, silver glitter and various hues of gray and black. Such museum art is only transported by reliable art handlers to ensure it’s authenticity and safety.
Van Gogh‘s The Starry Night.
They were all obviously still lost in the stars. Stellar! We could get behind this.
We were ultimately impressed with their presentation skills and their ability to defend their creative approaches to their individual painting projects.
We were proud parents, especially when they turned it around and asked us to present and defend our ideas for our bedroom: slate gray and off white. Boring.
Maybe we’re bad parents because we still haven’t launched into the actual manifestation of the projects. Spring immediately sprung and we all wanted to do outdoor activities.
Plus…I still hate painting. Honestly, there are many other things I’d rather be doing right now.