I tend towards over thinking: analysing eventualities, considering contingencies, thinking things over and over like a dog worrying a bone.
But not always.
Sometimes I think just far enough ahead to get myself into trouble and then hindsight starts to kick in.
My task for today was to scrape loose paint off the front of our house – above the porch – as preparation for repainting it and if the rain held off actually do the repainting.
I thought through what I needed:
- A bucket to mix paint with sand which I’ve been told might stop the paint flexing as much in the sun and prevent having to repaint too soon.
- The tin of paint.
- A screwdriver to lift the lid off.
- A ladder to get up to where the paint was flaking away.
- Someone to hold the ladder.
- A scraper.
I was set. I had everything I needed. We did everything carefully – no broken windows when we moved the ladder. I didn’t fall off the porch roof. I cleared away all the loose paint and left a surface that should be just right to apply the first coat of paint.
I was prepared.
Apart from considering what would happen to all those small flecks of paint I’d be scraping off…
Thousands of differing sized, cream coloured, slivers of paint. All over our driveway…
I wasn’t prepared for that. I picked up the larger pieces by hand. I tried sweeping. Got some of them. Tried hoovering (don’t tell the wife!) Got most of the rest.
If I do this again I’ll get some ground sheets out and can capture the worst of it in them and shake them out into a bin.
Sometimes we can over prepare, sometimes we can under prepare. I under prepared. The job took longer, but the job got done. Well, mostly. It looked like it was going to rain so painting has been moved back to another day.
