We recently had our laundry room re-painted. The painters figured it was a 1 day job, maybe a little more depending on how long it took to remove the wallpaper.
By Day 5, we were all wondering if this ‘small’ home project would ever be finished.
See, the wallpaper was old, like from 1965. Think bright orange and yellow hippy themed flowers. It had been put up on un-primed dry wall and proved to be the hardest wallpaper removal our painters had dealt with.
I’ve heard people say that when it comes to painting it’s all about the preparation. After this experience, where it took 5 days to prep the walls – which included removing the wallpaper, mudding, drying, sanding and priming the walls – but only 5 hours to paint them, I really know what this means.
There are so many lessons in this little experience – about the importance of preparation and being organised. But the one that stands out under this Aries lunar eclipse, is the idea of ‘Out with the old, in with the new’.
When we first moved in I was desperate for this room to be refreshed. I wanted to paint right over the existing wallpaper + paint combination to make it instantly better. What can I say, the fast fix has its appeal!
At some point in the past, the eye catching (!) wallpaper described above had been painted over in a sky blue. Before that, shelves had been hung on the walls. Even though those shelves were no longer there, we knew where they’d been because they had been painted around, leaving wallpaper showing through the baby blue paint in the shape of the support frames.
Needless to say it was a bit of a design disaster.
To do this job properly though we were going to have to remove everything. Even though my plan seemed simple, it couldn’t be made manifest until the old had been removed.
An eclipse on the south node is a bit like this laundry room experience.
You know how you want things to look and be, but to get there you’ve got to thoroughly, deeply and with effort remove or release the old.
The bonus? Once you do, the making of the new is simple.
Where in life are you symbolically removing old wallpaper to manifest a new reality?