Most people would look at our house and decide painting it was a job for professionals. My mum and dad decided it was a job for their kids.
I grew up in a house that was always being renovated. That’s not hyperbole, it was literally always being renovated. Just one big DIY project that lasted 30 years. Bought in the 70s as a three bedroom, single storey house, by the time I was born in the mid 90s – the ninth of 10 children – the house was two storeys, eight bedrooms, three bathrooms, one garage and a deck that couldn’t be walked on in case you fell through it to your death.
The flooring was a mix of old carpet, bare floorboards (not to be walked on barefoot because of nails), and a big slab of concrete for the entire newly built downstairs that was – huge luxury – heated. Various walls would be without drywall or insulation for years at a time, resulting in the framing being used as makeshift shelving. I heard stories of my mum spending all day on the jackhammer while pregnant with me (or maybe it was my older brother), wanting to have the basement dug out before I was born. Another brother used to insist that he would’ve been taller if he hadn’t spent his adolescent summers wheeling barrows full of dirt and concrete for hours at a time.
There was always a job to do, like using pliers to pull out thousands of vinyl staples in the kitchen, or chiselling concrete off a pile of free bricks to build a garden wall. Then once every 10-15 years, a full summer holidays would be dedicated to painting the entire exterior of the house.
If any normal person looked at the size of our house and was told it needed to be painted, they would say that it was a job best left to professionals. My mum and dad looked at the size of our house and decided it was a job for their kids.
First the scaffolding went up – terrifying metal frames that stretched up five metres high in order to reach the guttering. Once the scaffolding was up on one wall, it would soon be filled with Chapmans of every age. Up to 10 people spread across the wall, performing the same task on their patch of boards.
If there was ever a strategy discussed, it was never discussed with me, but natural patterns always emerged. The fittest and fastest were on the top level because painting above your head (under the roof) gets very sore very quick. The slower, younger lot handled the middle section which was usually the largest, and the little kids (including myself) were on the ground covering only about five weatherboards but also acting as runners any time someone dropped their brush from five metres up or needed a paint refill from the garage. Those who really couldn’t paint well were in charge of preparing morning tea and lunch for everyone.
Most of us would be on one end with the big brushes, painting any weatherboards within reach. On the other end, my eldest brother and mum were on windows as the cleanest edge cutters. Every day, during the 2001 paint, then the 2010 paint and any internal painting in between, my dad complained that the window painters were too slow. He could do it twice as fast, he reckoned.
In 2008 we window cutters finally let him prove it. He was right. He finished the downstairs bathroom trim in half the time and for seven years I had to look at wobbly purple lines around the window every time I took a shower.
The big painting summer of my childhood felt like a lifetime to me but in reality it was three weeks, surely a record for a house of that size. With so many of us, the whole side of the two-storey house could get two full coats in a single day (which it did because the scaffolding had a daily hire fee).
There was a promotion running on paint that summer – for every 10 litre bucket of paint purchased, you got a free lawn chair. By the end of the three weeks, lawn chairs were being given away as Christmas presents. It took more than 100 litres of paint to finish two coats but no labour costs. My parents never even bothered to get a quote from a professional.
Fourteen years later, fresh from graduating university and a dozen declined applications for casual retail work, I really needed a job. When my frugal aunty complained about the quotes she’d just gotten to have her house painted, I said I could do it for half the price. Did I know how much paint cost or how long it would take to paint a house alone? Of course not, but the thought of getting a lump sum of money and one big task to complete with it was instantly appealing.
I estimated how much paint I would need, what equipment I’d need to buy and how long it would take. I grossly underestimated every category. I bought a pair of painter’s overalls for genuine reasons instead of as a student party costume. Thanks to our family’s history with painting, I had a bunch of equipment and tips and tricks up my sleeve. I made my little plans each night for the next day, and took my little trips to the paint shop for replacement brushes and top ups, and had my little lunch breaks and Friday treats. It was the most accomplished I’d ever felt, but it came with some lessons.
Because I was blasé, I painted one east-facing wall in the middle of the day, leading to a massive bubble on the side of the house that I blamed on the paint. When I repainted it in the sun again with a different paint, it happened once more. By the time I digested that you shouldn’t have wet paint in the middle of the day in summer, I’d sanded and painted that one board four times.
At one point I decided to hire my little sister as a contractor. Despite being three years apart in age, she is Gen Z and I’m not. She insisted on taking her full lunch break and refused to work overtime, eventually decided she couldn’t be bothered with the sun and quit. Such boundaries have served her very well in her career.
As a business venture it was a disaster. Even with my mum kindly working for zero dollars an hour for half the project, I ended up making something close to $10 an hour. And yet it was the most enjoyable job I’ve ever had. Without a deadline and working alone a lot of the time, painting was peaceful and satisfying. Each wall or window I finished was immediately noticeable and at the end of the day, I cleaned up my tools, drove home and felt proudly exhausted. On my last day on the job, I stood in the driveway and couldn’t believe that I had just painted a whole house. Besides the bubble saga, my aunty was a happy customer.
That was my last paying job before I went travelling, returned home and became a journalist. It was also the last time I painted a house. Since then I’ve lived in four rentals and every one of them could’ve done with fresh paint. But my heart’s not in it enough to paint someone else’s house for free. Instead, whenever my partner and I briefly entertain the idea of buying a house together, the first thing I look at is the paint. I always hope it hasn’t been done recently. That way I’ll have an excuse to hire myself again for my favourite job.
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