Painting the house

Redecorations are afoot at the family home.

It's one of those things.  When my grandmother was still alive, I kept making comments like:  "This is rather old and a little bit broken, should we replace it?"

Like the paintwork.  I would say things like:  "This house was last painted in 1988, should we have it repainted?"

Generally speaking, this would result in people frowning at me, and then completely ignoring my suggestion.  The idea was that we didn't want my poor invalid grandmother who was stuck in the house all day every day to have to put up with anything new.

I could never quite work out why a new fridge would cause her distress and sadness.  Personally, I would have thought being stuck in a nice house full of pretty things would be preferable to being stuck in an old, ratty house full of old, ratty things, but then I'm a normal person.

Apparently, in my family, being able to put up with crappy stuff for no good reason is a sign of courage, or something.  Either that or, once you get to a certain age, you no longer deserve nice things.

Anyway, now that my grandmother is long dead, my mother has finally come around to the idea that maybe 25 years between paint jobs is a bit much.

I think it helps that I've mentioned to her that a lack of maintenance lessens the value of the property, which will have an effect on my inheritance.  More than once.

This is the way we have to play in my family:  You have to find the right buttons to push, and then you have to push them multiple times... and wait for many years to see if it had any effect.  However, if you accidentally push the wrong buttons more than once, you may ruin all chanced of ever achieving anything.

So, anyway, my mother came up with this grand plan of wasting her long service leave on repainting the interior of the house herself (she hired professionals to do the exterior).

This does, of course, mean that we are engaging in the following, well-worn pattern:

• I must help my mother as much as I can, or I feel like a failure as a daughter
• She must prevent me from helping her as much as she can, or she feels like a failure as a mother

But, that said, we are managing to paint the house.  Just not well.

For some reason, a 60yr old English teacher and her librarian daughter aren't quite as competent at house painting as, say, professional painters.

We just keep reminding ourselves that it just has to look good enough to convince people that it has, in fact, been maintained over the years.  Once some other poor sap has bought it, they can do a proper repainting job themselves.