My wife likes house aesthetics. We live in a house in the country, and the house needs continuous maintenance and improvement. She wants the various house stuff like kitchen furniture to be right and staircase walls to be painted and garden to be finished and nice-looking. We have been doing this kind of work ourselves over the past 10+ years.
Recently she decided to paint herself our balcony’s railings, after asking me and my father to do so over the past year in vain. We had promised to do it but postponed and postponed indefinitely. I had previously done half our balcony. We both liked the finished part of the balcony and admired the teal-like color we had chosen. But the other half of the balcony was not painted yet and was looking ugly and rusted.
So she asked details, she gathered the necessary tools, she cleared her schedule and we started. I helped her the first day. Painting iron railings is not easy. You have to spend many hours over many days under the sun bending down to reach all the difficult spots and get up again to fill your paintbrush with paint and all over again. At the end you are left dirty and tired.
I started painting a difficult part while I showed her how to do the more easy so that she gets used to it. When I turned to look at what she was doing I saw that she had made a mess already. Like most things, there is a technique involved to do it better, and there is a way to paint iron railings so that you don’t spill too much paint and make the painted cylindrical iron rod look nice and smooth. She had been stuck at the start of the first rod and had been constantly cleaning the paint from the marble floor that she was spilling. The paint on the rod was looking thick and ugly.
I showed her how to correct it. I tried to convince her to follow my tips. Then I turned on my part.
After a while, I looked at her again. She had moved on. The railing rod was looking better. No paint spilled on the marbles anymore. She was working focused and seemed to understand how to do it. She had improved. She had learned how to do it. She was working on it without complaining. She continued on her own and finished it all by herself over the next few days. I believe she managed to feel happiness and satisfaction while suffering to create something.
I believe that her view changed when she leaned how to do it and undergo the painful suffering that the work entails. Now she sees a lot more. Every time she looks at other balcony railings, particularly those that I had done in the past, she sees a lot more that the nice color. She spots all the small parts that were not done right. She sees any corner what was left undone and notices all the spots where the paint spilled a bit. She sees parts that should have been painted again, because one layer of paint was not enough. Her view changed so that she does not appreciate the end result only. Now she has the experience to see more.
