Saturday, February 15, 2014

The Positive Effects of Wallpaper Removal

While my parents are down in Florida soaking up the sun, I have been fixing up their living and dining rooms. They decided to get the hardwood floors professionally redone and offered to pay me if I stripped wallpaper and painted both rooms first. The wallpaper stripping was a lot of work and took me several days, but it did something rather amazing. My creative juices had been stuck at a slow drip, but once I started spending my afternoons scraping and peeling, peeling and scraping, my mind cleared and opened up a steady flow of creative goodness. I cranked on my WIP (work in progress - a young adult novel), making more progress in a handful of weeks than I had in months. After the wallpaper was down and the walls fixed and washed, I started painting. The creativity is still flowing, but it has slowed from the original gush. Maybe it's because painting is slightly more creative and takes extra concentration. Maybe it's because I am at the halfway point in my book and am starting to feel the pressure that my characters are feeling. Maybe the paint fumes are killing my brain cells. Yeah, that's probably it.
As of this morning, the job is nearly done. We need to go back tomorrow and do some cleanup work, but the walls are painted and the room is cleared for the floor guy. Hopefully my parents will like the color and not want me to paint it again when they return. Although that could be a good thing if the juices get clogged. In the meantime, I need to keep plugging away at my book and seek out other forms of manual labor. Perhaps a closet clean-out project will do the trick.

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