I’ve been in the workforce for 11 years now. During those years, coworkers and family members have warned me countless times to pace myself and not get burned out. I’d politely thank them for their concern, and silently dismiss the notion. No way that’ll happen to me: I was born to work.
It happened to me.
Since a few months ago, I’ve found myself avoiding hard tasks at work. Minor problems that arise have become daunting. Small tasks that I used to look forward to have become dreadful. Difficult projects that I used to view as opportunities, I started viewing as giant burdens. I’ve stopped feeling pride and fulfillment at doing things well.
I think this is what burnout feels like.
Personality-wise, I’m the opposite of a procrastinator, so this is new to me. Being industrious and self-motivated has developed into such a core part of my identity, that seeing this change in my outlook is a little frightening.
My normal playbook when I need to recharge my batteries is to:
- lift weights
- play video games with friends
- eat takeout with the wife while watching trashy TV
But this time, I’ve found that my default go-to’s weren’t effective at restoring my motivation to go back to work.
Besides taking some time off of work, I decided to tackle my burnout by working on a small project that I actually wanted to do: learn how to paint a wall. I’ve read that the most time-effective solution to burnout isn’t rest — it’s doing something that sparks passion in you again.
Context pt. 1: the downstairs bathroom
Two years ago, my wife and I bought a house. It was a huge milestone in our lives, and we’re thankful every day that we are in a financial position to afford a house in silicon valley.
It’s funny how much effort people put into saving money to buy a house, and how little thought they put into how this purchase will improve their daily lives. Admittedly, I was one of those people.
Now that I’m there though, I’ve observed that the best quality-of-life change from owning a single-family home is that you can host friends and parties. My wife is a very social woman, and she enjoys being the hostess.
Unfortunately, the downstairs bathroom that party guests use is an awful shade of off-white/lime-green that my wife hates. I thought: I can paint that.
I’ve never painted an interior (or exterior) wall before, but how hard could it be? Can’t be something that I can’t learn from a YouTube video.
But before I tried painting for the first time on a very high-traffic area of the house, I thought I better give it a try on the lowest-traffic room of the house first: the guest bedroom. If I did an okay job there, then I’d try my hand at painting the downstairs bathroom. If I screwed it up, we’d hire a professional to repaint the guest bedroom and do the bathroom as well.
Context pt. 2: the guest bedroom
It truly is a luxury in the bay area to have a spare bedroom that you can designate as a guest bedroom. But my wife and I, childless, ended up buying a 5-bedroom house. So here we are. Guest bedroom.
It stays empty ~340 days out of the year, and consequently we never made an effort to make it nice.
Honestly, there is nothing wrong with it: it’s got a bed, and that’s all you really need. At least, that’s what I thought until I started spending more time in the guest bedroom.
My night routine before I go to sleep is to catch up on YouTube in bed on my laptop. My sleep schedule though, is fairly different from my wife’s. My wife wakes up at 7:00AM to get to the hospital. I usually wake up a few hours later just in time for my standup meetings, and so I usually fall asleep a few hours after my wife does.
In order to spare my wife from being exposed to too much blue light when she tries to fall asleep, I’ve been watching my shows in the adjacent guest bedroom during this pandemic. During this time, I got the opportunity to experience what it’s like staying in our guest bedroom. ̶I̶t̶’̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶g̶r̶e̶a̶t̶. It sucks.
Learning how to paint
I googled “how to paint an interior wall”, and spent ~45 minutes watching three YouTube videos on the subject. I think I know how to paint now.
Getting the gear
There was more stuff that I had to buy than I thought. Here is what I got:
- Paint roller brush, with wooden extension piece.
- Paint tray for roller brush.
- Hand paint brush for “cutting-in”.
- Small paint cup for when “cutting-in”.
- Drop cloth/canvas for protecting the floor from paint.
- Painters tape to mask the moulding/door/window/hardware.
- Sand paper + sand-paper grip/holder.
- Primer.
- Paint.
I was considering backing out of this whole project, up until I checked out and paid for all this. Now I’m committed.
Prepping the room
The hardest part of painting is the prep work that you do before you even open your can of paint.
First things first, I removed all of the furniture, wall hangings, outlet covers (this tiny room has five outlets — wow), and shelving from the room.
This part was simple enough, except that the floating white shelf that was there when we bought the house was installed in a very “thorough” way, and I accidentally ripped a lot of drywall out in the process— about half the size of a wallet.
I patched the hole with duct-tape (embarrassing, but true), covered that with spackle, and then sand-papered it down. We’ll see if you can tell after the primer and paint. Also, I discovered that the people who painted this wall previously just painted around the floating-shelf, rather than taking it down.
Next, I filled in all nail-holes (and other dents in the dry-wall) with spackle, and sand-papered all paint surfaces down with sandpaper. There were “paint bubbles” from the prior paint job where they used too much paint in some places, resulting in a bump/bubble of paint. Since I was about to layer on another thick coat of paint, I wanted to start off with as flat of a surface as possible.
Next, I covered the moulding, window edges, doorways, and outlets with painter’s masking tape.
This was easily the most tedious and annoying part of the project. There is moulding on the ceiling, on the ground, around the door frame, around the window, around every single outlet, around the closet…it was a nightmare.
Applying primer
The color of the existing wall was a light eggshell, and the new color I was going to paint on was a dark forest green — so theoretically I shouldn’t have to use primer (because the new color is darker than the old color). However, I decided to go all the way on this project, and apply a coat of primer.
This was my first time painting since arts & crafts class in the third grade. So I learned a lot about the technical aspects of how to apply paint to wall surfaces here (e.g.: how to load a roller brush, how to avoid dripping, how to “blend” roller strokes to make the wall appear a single shade, how to “cut-in” fine lines properly around moulding and the window).
It was exactly as hard as I thought it would be.
Painting
The shade of paint that I chose was a blend of turquoise and green. I assumed that when I opened the can of paint, that it would be a lot more green that it appeared. Turns out, you have to stir the paint in the can with your stir-stick very thoroughly before loading your paint, as the paint colors separate based on density while sitting in the can. This is absolutely not an optional step.
After about five seconds of stirring the paint, I saw that the dark green paint had all collected on the bottom, and the turquoise was sitting on top. After about a minute of stirring, the paint started looking like the shade that I ordered.
I’m really happy with how it turned out. I was a little iffy about the shade when I picked it, but it turned out exactly how I pictured it in my head.
One pro-tip about painting that I learned the hard way: always score along your painter’s tape before peeling it. “Scoring” is where you take a knife and cut along the edge of your painter’s tape. When you apply a thick layer of glossy paint and let it dry, the layer of paint turns into a sort of vinyl layer. Consequently, when you peel the tape without scoring it, you might peel a lot more paint than you want along with the tape. You could also peel the painter’s tape before the paint fully dries, but then you risk wet paint dripping down to your floor/moulding.
Playing the interior designer
Now that I’ve put in all this work painting the walls, it’d be a shame to just shove the lonely bed back into the room and call it done. I’ve always been an armchair interior designer. This seemed like the perfect opportunity for practice.
Voila! I made a few changes to the room, and ordered a number of pieces off of Amazon to make the room less bare and more functional.
The biggest change was moving the bed into the corner of the room. This should look familiar, because it’s the technique that every college student employs when they have limited space. The downside is that when two people are spending the night, it’s harder for the one on the inside to get in and out of the bed; but I think the tradeoff is worth it to get that extra room floorspace.
The most noticeably addition is this desk setup. After the guest spends most of the day hanging out with Anna and I, folks usually go off into their own rooms to do their wind-down routine. With the room as it was before, they were limited to sitting on the bed and doom-scrolling on their phone.
Now, folks who bring their laptop or any paperwork can spend a few hours at the desk, doing whatever they usually do during their downtime.
On the other corner of the room, I got a corner shelf, a chalkboard, and installed a set of pegs to hang clothes on.
Closing thoughts
I’m a software engineer. There is an incredible amount of uncertainty in the outcome of software projects. You can put in the hours and do everything right, but for reasons outside of your control, your launch may not have the outcome that you expected or hoped for. This aspect of the work can be disheartening, and in my opinion, contributed largely to my burnout.
Small home improvement projects like this, however, has a very predictable and tangible result. You get out as much as you put into the project, and at the end of it, you have a wonderful room that you (or your guest) can enjoy.
I had a lot of fun with this project. It solidified my feeling as a homeowner to have agency and control over what my house looks like. Painting a small room was a lot more work than I thought, but it’s given me the confidence to try my hand at similar projects in the future. I highly recommend it to anyone who owns a home.
