PAINT JOB: WHEN YOUR CHIPPING LOVE COULD USE A FRESH COAT

Does your paint pop or peel?

One of the more effective ways to add value and visual interest to your home is with a fresh coat of paint. Whether you are enhancing your home’s exterior or livening up the interior, paint ranks at the top of most individuals’ home improvement list. As a realtor, showing off beautiful spaces is a perk that comes with the business. There is no pleasurable job than taking a listing for a home so decoratively thoughtful, that it sells itself. However, as a woman who loves creating beautiful spaces, I am equally drawn to the potential of a home that needs the Midas touch or in real estate lingo, a little TLC. HGTV has become the platform for home makeovers, much like Queer Eye – whose premise was centered around five gay males, each performing a makeover in the scope of their own expertise of fashion, style, personal grooming, interior design & culture – was a platform for individual makeovers. Making over a distressed home is parallel to making over an individual in the distress of life. At minimal, both are paired with a stylist (decorator), a makeup artist (painter), and for a more invasive improvement, a cosmetic surgeon (contractor). Each plays a role in bringing out the hidden beauty that lies within the walls of their undertaking, be it human or inanimate.

So how on God’s green (sort of) earth is paint a common denominator between relationships and real estate? Glad you asked! Paint, in all its zillion palette of colors, is a coverup. A cover that is either used to conceal an unappealing blemish on a surface, such as dirt or damage, or to simply bring forth its beauty. add to its warmth. or give it a new life. This type of coverage is often applied to relationships. Of course, any skilled painter knows that before a fresh coat of paint can stick and the color POP, in most cases, the surface needs to be prepped, primed and before that the damaged paint removed. Skipping these steps will result in the tacky inevitable… a new paint job that looks just as rough as the old one.

What causes our chipping love?

Throughout my lifetime, I’ve witnessed individuals skip over the prepping process before slapping a fresh coat of paint onto the peeling remnants of their relationship. I’ve even been in a couple of those relationships – not wanting to deal with the reasons the paint was chipping to begin with:

• Maybe the environment was dry – dull, boring, lacking excitement.
• Maybe the bond was weak – damage from past relationships glossed over or skipping the repair and healing stages of one relationship before painting our way into a new one.
• Maybe the surface is layered with many different coats, covering too many unresolved dirty issues:

Oil-based (bitterness & resentment) + Water-based (hurt & anger) + Latex-based (lies & deceit)

equal a Chipping Hot Mess.

Whatever the reason behind your chipping love, prep w.o.r.k will protect your investment and your relationship. Starting with the most important relationship you’ll ever have in life, (outside of the one with Jesus Christ – full disclosure, I’m a Christian, deal with it) the one with yourself. More often, this relationship is the one we neglect the most. And for the same reason, a DIY painter would rather open a new can of paint and roll away the chipped, flaking imperfections that once was, as opposed to hand scraping the damaged paint first…It’s EASIER! Or in the declared words of viral sensation Kimberly “Sweet Brown” Wilkins, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” There is nothing (not. a. thang.) attractive about the word “scraping”. Whether it’s the cringing sound of fingernails “scraping” against the blackboard or the economic difficulties of working two jobs and barely “scraping” by, this word connotes a feeling of uneasiness. And when we live in a world where being comfortable is a lot easier than being courageous, that feeling is not a welcomed one.  So, we’d rather deal with the consequences of our lazy, half-a$$ paint job and the reality that those unsightly imperfections that we thought were covered 4eva by Benjamin Moore’s Studio Clay (one of my favorite paint colors btw) are rearing their ugly heads again. Yet, as tempting as applying the 4^th coat – the coat of denial – may seem, it might be time to get off the ‘I’m a glutton for punishment’ hamster wheel that’s leading to Nowhere Blvd and do your prep-work.

Warning! Warning!

The message you are about to read contains self-help tools for those brave individuals who are ready to scrape away the chipping hurtful layers of their past, so they can finally heal.

How to scrape away the chipping layers?

The oldest and most reliable tool for removing paint and rust from a surface is with a manual paint scraper. Similarly, when it comes to removing the chipping layers of our own internal surface, the manual scraper of T.R.U.T.H is still the most effective tool. Using this tool takes a lot of muscle strength (courage). It’s tedious. It requires patience and diligence, rest and deep breaths. It’s precise, allowing you to get deep in the corners of the flaking layers of your dysfunction and slowly scrape them away. With every scrape, the damaged layers begin to fall off:

broken heart. sadness. low self-esteem. insecurities. self-hatred. anger. jealousy. old wounds. disappointments.

They all begin to fall away. chip by chip. flake by flake. layer by layer.

Patching the holes in your wall & in your heart

Until the hole that bore the wound is all that is left. And newsflash, once the chipping paint has been scraped away, the craters left behind are far less appealing. For some of us, the craters are deep, because the wound was deep, but for ALL of us, the repair process is the same. To repair a hole left by scraping, a painter will apply a patching compound to the damaged areas in smooth thin layers, allowing it to dry completely before sanding, priming and painting the exposed wall. For our internal walls, the master painter of our soul uses a patching compound that is tailored to our specific wound: Love over Hate. Joy over Sadness. Forgiveness over Resentment. Peace over Worry. Healing over Pain. And once the compound has dried and smoothed over with the sanding of compassion, the surface of our once chipping love is now ready to be primed with unimaginable POWER and painted poetically with PURPOSE.  My new color is Benjamin Moore’s Plum Martini! What’s Yours? ?

Shop here to find your new paint color.