The time I painted a house

For some reason I seem to think that when making a decision, choosing the most difficult choices possible in life will make my life easier.  When I was 23 I moved to Hays, KS to finish my bachelor's degree.  I went house hunting and could not believe my luck when I found a little house on the corner of 13th and Allen that was only $450 a month.  The whole house had just gotten new carpet, fresh painted walls and a brand new electric fireplace with a blower.  I didn't have enough money for a deposit so I decided to offer to strip and repaint the entire outside of the house in lieu of a deposit.  The landlord agreed to this exchange (and why wouldn't he???) and my husband, my dog and his cat moved in within the week.  (Oh...did I mention that my husband at the time had survived a traumatic brain injury about six months before and was still very much impaired? or the fact that we decided to get married after only 4 months of knowing each other? or that the injury happened only four months after that?)  One might think that agreeing to strip and paint a house by yourself...literally, by yourself would be an unwise choice...one might think.
I decided to put my husband to work scraping the house with me.  I could only let him scrape the bottom 5 feet of the house though because he was still not able to get on a ladder without falling over; to be completely honest, he was barely able to walk without falling over!  So, he took the bottom and the top 15 feet or so were all mine.  As you can probably imagine, it was taking a really long time to scrape this house...so I decided to rent a pressure washer!  Danny was a man who loved a powerful engine and since the accident he had not been able to work on his truck so this power washer was like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  I decided to let him use the washer first and after showing him how to use the thing, went around to the other side of the house to work. I came back to check on him and could tell he was having a blast and I could see so much paint just flying off the house like magic so I decided to go back to my side.  Who knows how long I went before checking on him again but when I came back I found a kind of mural on the side of the house.  By Danny's logic, if the power washer did such a good job of removing paint at the level I set it at, then if he turned it up all the way he could remove twice as much twice as fast!  (I once used this same logic in 8th grade wood-shop when I removed gigantic chunks from the top of my wooden step stool by re-setting the blade on the plane after the teacher had set it to the appropriate level.) Only this was a really old house and the siding was wood.  The powerful force of the water cut into the wood about 1/4 inch everywhere it went.  We had the most unique siding in all of Hays.  A company of professional painters would have either sanded all that siding (which I tried, for about a minute and a half to do) or replaced it.  I was not a professional or a painter and my landlord was really old and near-sited.