At some point in your life, you’re probably going to have to paint a wall, particularly if you’re a homeowner or if you’re a home renter who is trying to hide certain funny stories from the landlord.

Of course, if you’re doing a job, you want to do it right, and you want to push it off as long as possible under the guise of doing something productive, which is why today we present:

HOW TO PAINT YOUR WALL—A PRIMER:

Primer! Don’t forget the primer.

Why Should You Paint Your Walls?

Perhaps you have to redo a wall because one of your children threw another one of your children through that wall, and you can’t hang a picture large enough to cover the hole. And then your wife made them patch the wall and then spackle it and then spackle it again, and it’s a whole process that so far has been taking years of coaxing your kids to do each step one at a time< You say it’s neither one’s fault, but now your family is heading into shidduchim (you hope) and people are coming in and judging your walls. And even though your kids kind of deserve it because if anything in your house reflects on them it’s this, you don’t necessarily want it to reflect on the one who’s in shidduchim at this moment. So you say, “Don’t you want her to find a shidduch and move out?” And then finally your kids are like, “Fine. How do we do it?” and you talk them through it. And then you write an article!

I’m just saying what you should do. This has nothing to do with my own life. Just be happy that you’re fixing a wall, and that this article isn’t called something like, “How to fix a breakfront, of which you’ve broken the front.”

There are also other reasons to paint a wall. For example, some people say, “I’m sick and tired of this color.” Which is definitely something our grandparents used to say in Europe. Painting is definitely the quickest way to change the color of a room, other than opening the shades. If you’re sick and tired of a room’s color, you may be spending too much time in that room.

How to Choose a Color

Some thought definitely has to go into this, because you’re going to be like, “I thought the room was white,” and your wife is going say, “#1, it’s not white. It’s linen white.” Which makes no sense. Not all linen is white.

“Linen white!”

So you say, “Okay, I’ll paint it linen white.”

But the truth is that it doesn’t really matter if it’s exact because either way you have to paint that whole wall in that color—not just the spot you’re trying to fix. And then you have to match the other three walls in the room, and they are full of handprints. So no matter what, the new wall is going to be a different color than the other walls. The best idea is to just put ceiling-height furniture along as many walls as you can. This is why Jews have so many bookcases.

The Challenge of Protecting Your Clothing

All you need is a set of clothes you don’t wear anymore. But not because it’s tight or restrictive or you split it exercising that time. It needs to fit you, but to have something wrong with it so that you would never wear it in public.

If you don’t want anyone to see you in your painting clothes, paint your windows first.

The toil of Preparing the Wall to Be Painted

Sit the wall down and say, “Listen, I feel like I’m talking to a wall.”

Obviously, if the issue with the wall is that there is a teenager-shaped hole in it, you have some spackling work to do first. And you can’t just spackle shut a 15-inch gap. How will the spackle know where to stay?

So first, you have to screw a piece of drywall into the hole. And to do that, you have to cut the hole bigger to make it straight and also to find a beam in the wall to which you can screw the drywall. You’re basically making a nicer hole, so you don’t have to figure out how to cut a piece of drywall that fits whatever jagged shape the hole was.

In our house, we keep a bunch of drywall from past construction projects for just this purpose. My wife has never let me throw out a piece of drywall. I have one piece that is 8 feet tall and three inches wide, in case that’s what shape the hole is. You never know what your kids are going to do.

Once you have drywall in the hole, you can spread the spackle, using a basic cream-cheese-on-matzah technique. Then you wait for it to dry, and then you sand it down to make sure it’s flat. Repeat this process until you are completely out of spackle and everything in your house is covered in a fine layer of spackle dust that reappears about a half hour after you clean it.

Painting the Wall

For the most part, painting is a skill you learned in kindergarten—just don’t go outside the lines.

And try not to step in the paint bucket.

When you’re putting on the second coat, it might be hard to tell where you’ve painted and where you haven’t, unless you’re doing the second coat in an entirely different color. Make sure to keep touching the wall to see where it’s wet.

Enjoy Your Freshly Painted Wall

If you put up a sign that says, “WET PAINT,” absolutely everyone will keep touching it. Including you. And then eventually, someone will say, “No, it’s not,” and then you’ll know. Or you can just wait until a child shoves another child into the wall again and see if their clothes come out dirty. Unless they all wear white shirts; then you can’t tell.

“It’s linen white!”

Oh. Then what color are the shirts?

Hang pictures over the parts where you felt the wall.

At no point should you ask yourself why this had to be part of Pesach cleaning.

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published eight books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].