A couple weeks ago I decided to paint the garage at our lake house. As most men usually do, we anticipate how difficult the job will be and how long it would take. I missed both very badly.

The ceiling was the old popcorn sprayed texture so I thought I would start with the ceiling and work my way down to the trim, walls and finally the floor. I bought one of those roller pumps that keep the flow of paint to the roller for a quicker job. It liked to have killed me, but it took three hours or so to get the ceiling trimmed out and painted. I was pleased with how it looked so I then started trimming in the doors, windows, baseboards etc.

The person at Home Depot said I needed to do a base coat before the actual paint so that was like painted everything twice, but I said ok. Before I could get the base coat trimmed out, the ceiling started to dry and peel in flakes. I was like well I will touch up that little spot but no biggie. Well, before long I had 20 peel spots the size of your hand and I was like, “you’ve got to be kidding me.” I found out you can’t paint over popcorn and you especially can’t roll paint over it because it will come loose which is exactly what happened.

Long story short it took me three days to paint that silly garage and I couldn’t hardly walk for the next day. I still must have some experts come in and redo the ceiling. Ha. My point is this, sometimes projects take less time than expected but more times than not, the job can get more complicated and involved the further into the project you go.

It’s kind of like that with relationships. jobs, friendships, finances etc. Sometimes it just takes longer than you expect but if you stay at it, your chances of fixing the issue, repairing the damage, or competing the job go up dramatically. KT