Facing Your Fears

From time to time in our lives we face our fears. Some finally touch a snake. Some leap from a bridge with a bungee attached to their leg. Some open up the fruit cake package and taste it.

I have a fear of working on my house. I don't know why. I worked for two years as an auto mechanic while attending BYU. I can tear apart an engine and put it back together - and it will work. While in grad school I had to learn how to weld in order to assemble test hardware for my research. I have these tremendous mechanical abilities, yet when it comes to working on my own home I cower. I think it has something to do with artistic craftsmanship. It's easy to bolt pieces together when you buy furniture from Ikea, but ask me to build a table from raw materials and I freeze up like a corpse in a morgue. I just don't have that artistic ability in my hands. So, I'm afraid to do anything for fear of messing it up.

Well, I've lived in my condo for six years now, and since the day I moved in I've been talking about rennovations on it. Yeah, six years. I haven't done anything on it. Well, that is, until today.

Today I finally sucked it up and started on the rennovations. Phase 1 is to remove the old 70's popcorn texture from the ceiling. I started in the spare bedroom, you know, just in case I screwed it up. It came out okay. Only a couple of gouges in the ceiling drywall, but those can be easily patched. Then I spent the next several hours doing the big closet, the other bedroom and the hallway. It took a long time for a seemingly simple job. I didn't do my prep work as well as I should have, so I had to spend about 2 hours cleaing up after I was done. Blegh. Well, now I know what to do for the other half of the house so that it will go much faster.

So, I faced one of my fears today and started working on the condo. We'll see how fearful I get once I start attempting to install the recessed lighting in the living room.

Now where did I put that fruit cake....