You thought you had us. You thought that after two coats, when you were still streaky, that we would give up and paint the room black. You thought your slippery, goopy, streaky, hard-to-find Benjamin Moore Deep Base 319 3B would be the end of us.

But we had a secret weapon: Brian. See, Brian used to paint houses for a summer job. Brian wasn’t scared of you. Brian would not bow to your tyrrany. He scraped up a third coat out of two quarts of paint and a prayer and got the job done right.

Thanks Brian and Jill for tackling the Terra Cotta, Bob for taping night after night, Matthew for our yellow dining room, Mandy for our yellow kitchen and for daring to wear Amy’s tiny painting dress, Rachel and Wade for masterful painting and the terrifying paint machine, and Luke for making the sunroom sunny. We couldn’t have done it without you.

I’m leaving Amy, Sandy’s mom, off that list on purpose. What she did for our house was way above and beyond any mere “painting.” It was superhuman and deserves an entire post all to itself.