Modeling Life-Long Learning

If you recall, we are in the midst of getting our house ready to sell… we are downsizing in a big way!! Part of the downsizing includes clearing out the curriculum that my children have used and passed by. I have been listing all my curriculum for sale and have been so blessed to have sold a ton. I still have loads more to go, so keep watching that post, I’m adding to it all the time! We have so much we are getting done in preparation for putting the house on the market:

We have a new liner going into our pool.
A new slide for our pool coming.
I am painting the mortar of our brick floor in the kitchen (I’m writing a post on that too, I’ll link it when I complete the post).
And, getting our house painted by an outside contractor. Well, at least I thought we were!

Apparently this is another one of those projects that we are supposed to do ourselves because we literally can’t hire a painting contractor to do it. So, here we go again… I’m beginning to wonder if I jinxed us when I named the farm “Live and Learn”! We seem to be doing a whole lot of that lately! No, not really… but we are certainly modeling life-long learning for sure!

I am just going to add this to our ever-growing real life homeschool activities. You see, we have had a plan in place for a long time to expose the boys to as many experiences (work-wise and leisure activities) as possible while they are here with us. This might even be a blessing. Chase has really been struggling to identify a business he wants to throw himself into for the next few years. And since apparently there is a great need for exterior painters in our area, this just might be the beginning of a paint contracting business for them through high school! Hey, you never know!!

In preparation for this huge task, I have been doing some research. I found a great article on This Old House by a professional painter who gave us lots of suggestions. The pro mentioned that half of a great paint job is the prep work. You need to get the surface ready to paint by scraping, sanding, filling, sealing, and priming first. Then, and only then, do you paint. Today, we began this new life-lesson on prepping our house for painting. We got about half the front porch completed and still have a lot more to do! This project may take us a while, but I’ll post updates to let you know how it is going! Here are a few pictures of what we got done today…

Whew… the house is going to look UGLY for a few weeks at this rate! I guess that will be part of my motivation to get it done!! I’m not going to say this project doesn’t intimidate, because it does. But, not because of the scope (although that is enough to intimidate most painters apparently) but because we have so much going on already! It already feels like we are furiously treading water. So prayers will be greatly appreciated for us to stay on track and not let this project stagnate like we have a tendency to do when we are overwhelmed.

And finally, the last aspect that is uncomfortable right now is the fact that we will have to spend some money on tools to do this project. So far we have purchased:

But that is nothing … to do a project this size, there are two major purchases we have identified that we will need to get:

The first is a pressure washer. We are always borrowing a dear friend’s washer. It is here more than it is at his house. We have PVC fences that are constantly needing to be washed, brick walkways and patios to hose down, driveways and a portico that needs to be washed and not to mention the house itself. So, this one will get used and often! Today we purchased a Generac 6590 from Amazon. We really wanted to buy it locally, but if we ordered it from Home Depot it would not be here until after July 4th… and that is going to be a weekend of working o this house painting project! So, we ordered it from Amazon, even though it has an awful review there… the reviews on Home Depot, are fantastic, so that is the reason we still bought it!! And speaking of faster shipping… Have I mentioned how much I love having Amazon Prime? Honestly, between borrowing Kindle books for homeschooling and my need for speed with the deliveries, I more than recuperate the $79 it costs for a year!! Try Amazon Prime for free on me !!
And the second big purchase is a paint sprayer. This one we will be buying at Home Depot, because it is much cheaper than Amazon (which is unusual)! This will be a lifesaver on this size house… but we also have a ton of other paint projects on the horizon. We are planning to paint cabinets, shutters, plantation blinds, and outdoor furniture… so this will certainly get used as well!

I really hate to spend that money right now when we really can’t afford it… but I think these will be wise investments and we will come out way ahead in the end. And, once we downsize, if we don’t have a need for these tools, we can always sell them!!

So, say a prayer for us. This is a huge project that we were not planning to tackle. We trust that God has a plan for us through this, so we are jumping in head first and getting it knocked out. I’ll post an update on our progress soon!

Until then… be a blessing to someone!