Last month instead of traveling like we normally do when camp season ends, we took a week for a family staycation. Earlier in the summer I’d proposed the idea of having a staycation where we focused on thoroughly cleaning the house. I thought it’d make for a great vacation, and everybody else was pleasantly supportive. The idea was to spend the morning and afternoon hours on house projects, and the evening hours on doing something fun as a family.

We actually had a really good time. Several nights we went out to eat. One night we explored a downtown record store with old pinball machines. One day we spent the day at the waterpark. I tried out three of the slower slides, then did well spending the rest of the time reading under an umbrella. Another night everyone went to the drive-in (me and one of the boys stayed home). My personal favorite was the night we walked the streets of downtown Springfield.

You can’t really tell anymore that we cleaned. I knew a week wasn’t a whole lot of time to cram in everything I would’ve liked to get done. The one exception to this was a project that wasn’t even on the list, which was our homeschool timeline wall. Several years ago, I ordered a ten-foot timeline from Answers-in-Genesis to display on the wall as a teaching tool. It outlines the 7 C’s of history: Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross, Consummation.

I rarely used it. We’d bought trim and made a border for it, and it was on the bottom third of the wall where little ones could walk by and see it at eye level. After several tries to find an accent color to go above it, I gave up and for years it’s been a darker mauve. Since we were already painting over a deep blue accent wall, I thought we might as well just go ahead and paint the hallway. It was a labor of love on several people’s parts, and I absolutely love how the wall turned out.

It’s just a plain white now. While for a while I loved the colors, the symbolism of the arrows I added from Hobby Lobby, and just the overall busyness and stimulation of the wall, now the wall is soothing and peaceful. Every time I walk through it makes me happy, as the satisfaction of productive work returns. The hallway is one of the places where the house gets natural window light, and now with the lighter color, the wall is able to reflect the light back in ways it couldn’t before.