When Life Feels Gray, Just Add Color

The Way of Gratitude: Day 2 (originally published here)

Today started out quite plain. Get dressed, eat breakfast, kiss Tim goodbye… And then I pulled out Jack’s Make-A-Plate kit (a gift from Aunt Teri, thank you!). Caps came off markers, coloring books were used as templates and Jack drew a plate exactly as pictured on the box… (I wonder how many plates Discovery Toys receives from kids who can’t get the one idea from the box out of their head. “But that’s how you do it!”) except “without a dog.” He doesn’t like dogs. (update: He now loves them. We’re getting one soon! Stay tuned…)

After coloring the plates came play dough. And after the play dough, watercolors. It was quite the colorful day. (Ben was inspired to give himself multi-colored zebra stripes on his arm.)

When the colors had died down (and Ben had a bath), I began looking around our house thinking, When are we going to make this place our own? It could really use some new paint. There’s some nice vineyard feeling detailing in the dining room and living room – Tuscan, you might say – but I really don’t like the colors in the kitchen. And our bedroom is white. Blech. So I called Tim, inspired and excited to get started, when he reminded me, the outside needs to be painted first.

Oh yeah.

It’s bad. Really really bad. Not only is it fading in some places and chipping in others – ok, flaking might be a better description – if you even touch the house, you’ll have dusty white paint on your fingers. Not ok.

Inspired to paint the inside, I agreed to start with the outside. But first, colors. How can one truly work towards the finished product without color cards encouraging you along the way? So, I packed the boys into the car, went to Home Depot (or The Big Men’s Store as my Dad taught Jack) and picked up a bunch of colors!

Aren’t they pretty?

Honestly, before feeling inspired to paint the house, I was feeling fairly discouraged for rather complex issues I can’t do justice here. But the very idea of making something new, of reviving our tired looking home had me so inspired and hopeful… I just couldn’t be more thankful. In the midst of a bleak circumstance comes a ray of light, soon to be reflected on our creamy, yellow home. And I’m grateful. Because without that inspiration, I probably would sit around wanting it to get it done without feeling like doing it myself.

And after the house comes the kitchen. Yay!!!

update: ok, the kitchen never got painted, but here’s a before and after of our house. Before I could take the “before” my  husband had already taken down our ugly forest green shutters. We are going to add some gray frames to the windows soon. And make the trim the same color gray since we switched halfway. Whatever! It’s so much better than our before!

And if you ever come over, you are likely to see crayons, markers, paints, and coloring pages spewed around our home. My new motto: when life feels gray, just add color.