Painting your kid's room

ERICA MEYER RAUZIN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

There are two ways to paint your kids' bedrooms. The best way is to pick up the telephone and call a painter, but that's not the way we did it.

Instead of a conversation between adults that ended reasonably with something like this:

"Yes, please, white with blue trim and have it done by Tuesday," we had a conversation across the generation gap that ended something like this: "If you paint a heart on the toilet, Mommy will never make your bed again."

Actually, you can paint your children's bedrooms in 10 easy steps.

1. Ask the children what colors they want their rooms to be. Explain that the choices are confined to yellow (the Spongebob years), pink (the Barbie years) or white with a trim in a single livable hue. Olive green may come up during those G.I. Joe moments, but try to discourage it. Black isn't a suitable color for a kid's bedroom unless your child is a rock star, in which case you are beyond my humble help and should be reading Rolling Stone and counting your money.

2. Pick up the paint. Insist on the water-soluble kind. This will be extremely important to your future happiness.

3. Tell the children to put on sloppy clothes to wear while painting. Try not to mind that one kid's idea of "sloppy" is the hand-knit smock your great-aunt spent months creating (which does look, unfortunately, like something that pre-dates Van Gogh), and your idea of sloppy is a pair of cut-off jeans and a 10-year-old T-shirt imprinted with the Coca-Cola logo in Hebrew.

4. Try to wear out the children with preparations. Tape the window edges and the mirror borders; remove the smaller furniture and push the rest into the centre of the room; cover the floor with old sheets (this will make you feel better, but it won't help). But note that your children will probably not want to waste any time at all on preparations if the paint is in the house and visible. Leave it in the car until the last moment.

5. Throw the dog out of the room. Maxim: the longer the dog's hair, the more paint it will attract. This is true of children also.

6. Bring the paint in and distribute the brushes. Adults get rollers and trim brushes; medium-to-small children get medium-to-small brushes. Give each child his or her own small container of paint (this saves mayhem, wars and drips) and assign each one a separate open expanse of wall. This will keep them happy, occupied and feeling involved for 10, maybe, if you're lucky, 15 minutes. Try to finish the rest of the room in that time.

7. Follow behind the children and wipe the (hopefully) still wet paint off of the light switch, fan switch, door knob and mezuzah cover. Of these items, only the me-zuzah cover – which is hard plastic anyway – will survive this experience. The door knob will never turn again and the switches will have to be replaced at great expense, but don't think about that now.

8. As the children tire of painting the walls, the woodwork, the window and themselves, create an easy way out for them. The route should go through the bathtub. If you let them into the rest of your house while they are still covered with paint, you better be sure you really love the color because you will be seeing it everywhere for some time to come. The worst damage of this type results when a barefooted child drips paint on the floor (the drop cloth sheets are now sodden and bunched in the corner), steps in the drip and then has to run to the kitchen for a strawberry yogurt, right at that moment.

9. Put a video tape on for the children and finish the room. At this point, we called in reinforcements because devoted sisters-in-law and older cousins will do baseboards, door frames and general tidying up, but children will not.

10. Since you didn't spend money on a painter, spend it on a babysitter. Take your helpful relatives out for a small libation and a good meal. Meanwhile, the sitter will put the children to sleep in your bed because their rooms still reek of paint. Never mind. By the time you get home, you'll be so tired and your back will be so sore that you won't care where you sleep.

Believe me, the fumes won't bother you at all.

Freelance writer Erica Meyer Rauzin lives in a messy house in Miami Beach, but the food is pretty good, so no one complains.

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