People are like painted walls, you never know what's underneath all those layers

Home remodeling projects always take more work and more time than we expect.
Several weeks ago, I started to tackle the bathroom walls.

Several months ago, I tried to ignore the bathroom walls.

The paint kept peeling. I would pick at it just a little with my fingernails, just enough to keep it smooth so the babies wouldn't mess with it. But, it just kept getting looser and looser until the spaces that were missing paint were pretty obvious.

Too BIG to ignore.

So, I got a scraper. I still intended it to be a quick job. Simple.
I would just scrape around the loose edges, get it smooth enough to paint and paint over the problem. That's obviously what everyone before me had done.

I even found the matching paint in the collection of various colors that line a wall in our basement. The can even said "downstairs bath"

But, no. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

The "downstairs bath" color was NOT the current color of the downstairs bathroom walls. No match. I looked again. I'm still hoping that maybe one of those unlabeled cans might be a match, because I haven't opened them all, so there's still hope.

But, then I had another thought. The painted walls look like tile. The floors are ceramic tile. Hard tile. Like every dish that hits the floor breaks on this tile. What if the bathroom walls were the same tile, but painted over? Wouldn't that be neat?

I thought maybe I could pull back the layers and find something beautiful underneath. I like to think I'm that way. Covered with layers of life experience, some beautiful, some ugly, but underneath it all is something wonderful. I wanted the walls to be beautiful underneath all that paint.

Layer after layer after layer, I slowly and carefully peeled and scraped until finally I found bare tile. But, it was not what I thought. It's just plaster.

Today, it made me think about how people are sometimes that way too. They look on the outside like something beautiful underneath the layers of life, but then they turn out to be mostly plaster covered in paint. Layers and layers of paint, but nothing but plaster in the end.

So, now, I've set myself up for all this work, and I still  have to finish peeling the paint layers off the wall, so my babies don't. And when that's done, it will be my chance to make it something beautiful. Because plaster can be patched and painted. So, I'll join the long line of women who have lived in this home and thought they could make it beautiful. This time it will be my turn to discover a beauty within myself that I can project onto the walls of my home, so that the next person might see something beautiful under a few less layers.