Walls

Yesterday I hit a wall, like a wall was never hit before. It could have been the days of packing, it could have been the annoyances of things not coming together as they should, it could have been balancing the kids by myself, but anyway you look at it a wall was hit.

When we first moved into our townhouse, the very first project we did was paint the wall in our living room/dining room red. It was a statement wall. We slept on an air mattress on the main level, painted all day and night. First thing in the morning we tore off the tape in a very excited fashion. We didn’t realize that it should have been delicately cut off and we damaged some of the paint. However, it was beautiful. It really dressed up our place and we took a lot of pride in that wall. In some ways it represented our beginning in this place as our home.

Over the weekend, per our renters request, we painted that very same wall white. Ironically as we painted this wall white, we had painters in our new house painting each and every wall in that house a variety of different colors (yet none of them the same reddish shade).

As I shuffled back and forth from house to house watching the transformation of our new house, ultimately to transform our old, it felt like a shift was happening. The old house was becoming less our home and the new house feeling more as our home. It was almost eerie.

As the painters in our new house were almost done, I decided that I hated the master bath color. In some ways it seemed symbolic of my uncertainty with moving forward. In actuality it probably was just an example of my ambivalence with colors but anyway I couldn’t help but feel like there was some symbolism behind it. Anyhow, I had the painters repaint it and am much happier now.

And back at my old house, it just doesn’t quite feel right without that red wall. Boxes of our things, mementos, and toys are making their way out of our rooms and the shell of this house is all that’s really remaining. It makes me realize that this really is nothing more than some dry wall and flooring. It’s the stuff that fills it up that makes it actually a home.

Today has been much better than yesterday. Things have been remedied, there is an end in sight and everything is looking good. I’m anxious to get this new chapter started, even if it means closing the last chapter. I think I learned so much from the last chapter that this new one has got to be good. And although I may not be positive about the new walls in the new house, one thing I’m sure about is that the red wall did us well but it’s time for some new colors in our life.