The trials and tribulations of a would-be perfectionist

I like things to be perfect, but I don’t like spending the time to make them so. I’m more of a broad brush person myself, when it comes to the actual doing. If I had money I’d get others to do the perfecting for me. But I don’t have money, and after reading David K Every’s article on Financial Happiness, I realise I never will have. I’m quite sure everything he says is right, but I’ve started too late, so I’ll just have to accept being financially unhappy. I’ll try to be creatively happy instead.

But to return to the perfection stuff …

We’re having friends over to lunch in a few weeks’ time and we decided to brighten up the toilet (no, NOT the ‘bathroom’, the toilet) and back porch area which is adjacent to the verandah. Old Queensland houses had toilets off the back ‘landing’. It was a step up (pun intended) from the ‘dunny’ in the back yard which preceded sewerage.

We’re on a colour binge at the moment and we’re using strong aquas and leafy greens, and rosy magentas and so on. Trust me, it will all look great (the trick when using strong colour is to use MORE strong colour). In addition to the paint, you need lots of wonderfully weird and colourful objects and cushions so that it all ends up looking eclectic and bohemian.

Anyway, Colin was inclined to just repaint the windows white because that, obviously, would be the easiest. But I said it wouldn’t look right. What WOULD look right would be that burnt orange we used on the doors in the living area. He agreed that would look right, but suggested I should do it … seeing as I’m an artist and have supposedly superior fine brush skills (did I mention these are windows with 3 smallish elongated panes top and bottom and a medium-sized one in the middle?).

Well, I spouted the bit about my broad brush approach, but I knew it sounded weak under the circumstances.

So here I am, when I should be doing more creative things, spending the whole day painting burnt orange onto fiddly bits, wiping wayward burnt orange off the glass, and getting burnt orange all over my person and clothes (I guess these clothes will be my painting clothes from now on).

Colin said I’d need to use a tinted undercoat first, but I took no notice did I, so now I’ll have to paint THREE cursed coats.

I think, to make the rest of my life easier, I’d better find a therapist who can break me of my perfectionist yearnings.

FOOTNOTE: Colin kindly removed the windows from the casements so that I could paint them more easily. Do you know, it looks much better WITHOUT the windows … the openings frame the luxuriant wisteria vine outside. Perhaps the antidote to would-be perfectionism is minimalism.