And packing up bedrooms.
And kitchens.
And living rooms.
I spent 3 weeks in Florida helping my friend and her girls get a rental house ready to exit.
It was fun, hard, exhausting and satisfying as we plowed through job after job.
But those walls.
Life with four little girls and a dog had left it's mark. Everywhere.
We patched and sanded and painted, and patched and sanded and painted.
Sometimes just an area, and sometimes an entire room.
But one wall in particular was determined to break us.
It was THE main wall you saw as you walked into the home and it was at least 12 feet high.
It had the most work to be done and it had to be beautiful.
We tackled it last.
It would not cooperate.
The paint had faded and so our spare paint didn't match.
We chipped a piece off and took it to Home Depot and had them recreate it.
It didn't match.
It had to match perfectly because we just couldn't reach the entire 12 feet.
With each failure we would look at each other and try not to cry-ha!
Finally, someone told us to take it to a specialty store that matched paint as close to perfect as possible.
We were skeptical but we chipped off one more piece and took it in.
It was almost perfect. We painted as high as we could-- it looked amazing.
I think we might have really cried that time.
We were soooo happy.
From then on, no one was allowed to walk by that wall without saying some sort of "holy hallelujah" in praise of its beauty--every single time and it never got old.
At the end of a really long 3 weeks, it was the pinnacle of our efforts.
It symbolized everything we had done.
It was a beautiful reminder that we could do hard things.
Yesterday, I had my friend send me a picture of that wall.
I just needed to see it.
I needed to remember that I can do hard things.
Oh yes, true beauty right there.
I did that.
