instant gratification

Instant gratification.

It’s what we all want, right?
There are not many things in my life that really offer instant gratification. Except for chocolate, of course.

Gardening takes a long time, and even if I plant the seeds at the right time, there is no guarantee that things aren’t going to freeze and I’ll have to plant again.

I have ZERO will power and can’t stick to a diet plan for more than 5 minutes, so trying and failing over and over at losing weight is a pitiful, depressing experience all around. And there’s chocolate.

While I love my chickens, we won’t be getting eggs from these new girls until they are 5-6 months old. That’s a long time to wait for an omelet, if you ask me.

But you know what does provide almost instant results? Paint!

Yes, paint. You pick a color, and once your surface it prepped, you can start immediately, and see the color that it’s going to be.

I bought this vanity at a garage sale a few weeks ago. I loved it immediately. I had one like this when I was a kid. It had a HUGE heavy mirror attached to it, and I think it came from some great aunt or something. I wonder where it is now. (Mom? What happened to that vanity, by the way?) Anyway, since it was made of real wood and I already loved the shape of it, I bought it and brought it home.

Then, when Ryan and I were walking through Lowe’s looking for other stuff for his new GARDEN SySTEM –that we will go into more about later, and I thought, “Oh, I should get some paint.” They had some little Valspar sample colors right on the desk for under $3. I pretty much said, “Ohh, this is so pretty!” and grabbed a little pot of paint. Yes, I spend THAT much time picking out my paint color. I decided that just to be safe, I would get two little pots, so I wouldn’t have to come back.

And then, when I had a couple of hours that were unscheduled, I started. I did do some light sanding and cleaned the dirt off, and then got started. That old piece of furniture seemed to be just SUCKING in the paint. I went over each surface a couple of times, and wasn’t really pleasde with how it was looking. Kind of streaky, if you ask me. Well, I soon ran out of time, and had pretty much used up the whole sample pot of paint, so I left my project and jumped in the shower. One of the kids saw my project and said, “Mom! I love that blue dresser! Is if for me?” I don’t actually know who it is for, but I’m sure we’ll find a use and a place for it once the basement is finished.

After our Mother’s day celebration, I took my friend Robin and my sister-in-law Julene downstairs to show off my project. I said that I wasn’t done yet, that I really needed to do another coat and fix some places, and they both said they wouldn’t do another coat. “You don’t want it to be too perfect,” one of them said. Too Perfect? Do you know me? Nothing I do is even remotely close to perfect, in fact, my motto is “good enough”, so I was happy to hear the encouragement to keep it a little rough. After all, I was just going to sand it and distress it a little bit.

So, I went over the spots I thought needed some work, then sanded it a bit, then did a little wash with payne’s gray to give it that “old” look. And then I put on a coat of poly to protect it and keep it shiny. John helped me with the poly coat.

Here it is now. It just took a couple of hours, a tiny amount of paint, and there we have it. Nearly instant gratification!

Don’t you love how nice it looks up next to the unfinished walls of our unfinished basement? That would NOT be an example of instant gratification right there, but we won’t go into that. Maybe some other post…when it’s finished.