cleaning up the list

There is paint on my hands as I type.

It’s dry. Don’t worry about the keyboard.

I’m waiting for primer to dry on a couple of folding doors. I trimmed them today and primed them. After I finish writing, I’ll go back out and prime the edges.

This isn’t big news. It’s a typical Saturday project.

The news is that we bought the doors three or four years ago. We bought them because the current doors keep coming off the track. The new doors have been in the garage, part of the accumulation of stuff that has kept it a one-car garage (or at times, a no car garage). They were not on my list for today. They wre barely on the list of projects that I know I need to get to. We even considered giving the doors to Habitat for Humanity earlier this year. But we didn’t.

During the past few months I’ve been working on working.

I’ve been working on organizing the garage. I’ve been working on some projects around our house (deck, bathroom painting, auto body repair). I’ve been working on throwing things away. I’ve been working on finishing.

That’s probably the most important word in all this. Finishing. And for me that means facing down the obstacles that I put in my own way.

I could give you a thousand examples of what that means. I will give you one.

When we bought the folding doors I’m working on, we bought them for an opening that I assumed was a standard. 48″. The doors are called 24″ which means that they are 23.5″. Which means that in a 48″ opening they have a bit of room to open. When we got home, I discovered that the opening is 47″. The doors would fit, I suppose, but only if you were making a wall rather than a door.

I have spent the past 3 or 4 years afraid of making a crooked cut on the doors.

Today I decided to cut the doors. I screwed a straightedge to the back of the doors where holes wouldn’t show. I made the cut. It turned out great. I’m now painting. By the end of November (depending on the rest of our schedule here), the project will be done.

There are a thousand projects on my list. I will never get them all done. Many of them don’t need to be done. But the current doors come off the track as often today as they did four years ago. And today I decided that I could finish this project. There are still 999. But rather than thinking about them all and doing, today I decided to do one.

Thanks for stopping by. I’m going back to painting.

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Just so you know, another project I started this week (Tuesday) is reading through the Bible. Lots of people have done it. Lots of people do it every year. I’m not lots of people. I’m not that structured. So I’m reading it through before the end of the year. Besides, if it’s a love letter, or a story, I have a hard time with the bit a day. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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