How to paint your master bedroom in just a few easy steps.

1. Move into your new house and decide immediately that the ugly orange wall in your bedroom left behind by the previous owners must go.
2. Get distracted for the next year by work, your wedding, your honeymoon, holidays, your birthday, your husband's birthday, Google Reader, other people's babies, The Great Healthcare Debate, and Farm Town.
3. Decide you want to paint the room yellow. Pick up paint chips everywhere. Stick them to the wall. Ask friends that come over for their opinion. Decide almost certainly on a color.
4. More distractions for several months, while you realize you want to paint your room green instead of yellow.
5. Pick up more paint chips, decide on another color, do nothing for several more weeks.
6. Finally decide that you will go and pick up paint that day. Use an internet calculator to determine that to paint your 17'x10' bedroom, you will need 4 gallons of paint.
7. Read an online review that says that a certain brand of paint is the best paint for the money. Realize you don't have any chips from that brand. Decide to go to the home superstore and pick a comparable color.
8. Be marginally unsatisfied with the paint choices at the store compared to the chips you already chose. Your husband will become fixated on a color (and will later deny this ever happened). You will have a niggling feeling it's a little too bright. Suppress this feeling and buy the paint and supplies.
9. Your husband will relate a story of how he painted his entire bedroom in 1994 using just paint pads. Therefore you will pick out a roller and several pads, but no brushes.
10. Go home in victory. Announce on the internet that you bought paint. Let the paint sit around for a week.
11. Your Product Owner will approach your desk with today's version of Why You Are Not Doing Particularly Well as Her ScrumMaster. She will spy the paint chip on your desk and stop mid-sentence to yell, "is that the color? You will hate that!" When you relate that you already bought it, she will tell you to take it back to the store. Tell her that stores don't take back mixed paint. She will argue with you, and then try to point out that you probably didn't spend that much money on it anyway, so it's OK to go and buy a different color. When she finally gets that you're going to paint with this color, she tells you half-heartedly that it will be OK and wanders back to her desk. Spend the balance of the afternoon in a funk, then decide you're going to use it anyway.
12. Holiday weekend! Wake up unusually early on a Saturday to prep for painting.
13. Move all your furniture to the middle of the room. Cover about 80% of it with a tarp, some ugly sheets that were on your husband's old bed before you got rid of it, and a few old towels. Determine that's good enough.
14. Once you close the bedroom door to start work, the cat will want to go nowhere and do nothing but get inside the bedroom. She will scratch on the door to get in for the next 48 hours.
15. Roll out plastic sheeting. Tape it to the trim along the floor. Tape the trim on the doors and windows. This step will take the entire morning.
16. Wash the walls with large sponges and diluted cleaning solution. Wipe down with plain wet sponges. Realize too late that tape and water don't mix. Retape large portions of the trim along the floor while grumbling.
17. Lunch break.
18. Open the can of paint, and start painting. Complete the entire room except for the 5 inches closest to the ceiling. Realize you have no idea how to paint that area without also painting the ceiling.
19. Go to the store and buy a thing to paint along edges that's kind of like a wide Venetian blind. Also, milk, tomatoes, and pretzels.
20. Go home and attempt to use the edger thingie. Realize it's too difficult. Proceed the tape the edge of the entire ceiling. This step will take the entire afternoon.
21. Paint along the ceiling.
    
22. Your husband will knock a container of paint off the ladder. It will fall directly on to your bedskirt, part of the 20% of your furniture you didn't cover. Figure it's a blessing in disguise, since you haven't liked that bedskirt since the day you put it on the bed. Unfortunately, it will probably take you six months to replace.
    
23. Declare the day over with.
24. Post a bunch of pictures to the internet. Despite the fact that you waver between love and alarm at the brightness of your room, dare anyone to say anything about it, proclaiming you "love it." Your friends are very diplomatic, noting "any color green looks good," "it's light and airy," "bold choice," "if you love it, that's all that's important," and finally, "that looks like green slime-- are you making a Nickelodeon room?" Laugh it off. Go in and out of the room 25 times over the course of the evening to stare at your bright green walls.
25. Go to Blue Moon Burgers and eat 8000 calories worth of greasy hamburgers, onion rings, and special sauce made from mayo and peanut butter.
26. At the end of the night, set up your camping pad, your inflatable mattress, and your sleeping bags in the second bedroom. The cat will decide this is the most exciting thing ever and will harass the shit out of your husband all night. (She would harass you, but wild horses couldn't wake you up). At 5AM your husband will kick the cat out of the room. Because the door doesn't latch, she will make her way back in. He will kick her out again and prop the door closed.
27. At 5:45AM your next-door neighbor will wake everyone in a 3-block radius up by dumping coolers full of ice on to your paving stone driveway. Your husband will go downstairs to see what the hell is going on, but the neighbor has already taken off. The reason for dumping ice on the driveway at the crack of dawn is never clarified.
28. Wake up at 9:00AM sore from your awesome sleeping arrangements. Take a good look at the room in daylight. Repaint the orange wall of doom. Notice you missed about 25 spots elsewhere in the room.
29. Realize that you do actually need to buy brushes. Head back to the store again.
30. Head home, paint over the missed spots. Declare victory. Much rejoicing, etc. Post more pictures to the internet.
31. Head out to the store to buy a new duvet cover you picked out last night on the internet, leaving your husband to clean up the mess.
32. Buy a new duvet cover and then go and look at shoes and Ann Taylor Loft. Realize you still have paint all over your arms and are unsuitable to be seen in public. Touch a bunch of merchandise anyway, just to see if anyone does anything. They don't.
33. Come home with a new blue and white duvet cover. Your husband, while barely taking his eyes off the television, says "well, the part near the ceiling doesn't look perfect. Some of the paint leached under the tape."
34. Run upstairs and survey the room. Realize the top of the wall looks like hell. Panic while you try to figure out what to do.
35. Your husband joins you and suggests that either you leave it alone or go and buy trim to go along the ceiling.
36. More panicking and brow furrowing.
37. Consult the internet. Had we bothered to do this beforehand we would have learned that the tape is supposed to come off immediately after you paint. To avoid the leaching problem. Awesome.
38. Your husband comes to the rescue. He re-tapes the entire ceiling, pressing as hard as he can, and leaving just a few millimeters of space so that you can paint over the uneven parts.
39. Get on a ladder and repaint the half centimeter in the wall-ceiling area. Rip the tape off as soon as possible after your finish painting a section. Discover a small amount has leached anyway due to the texture of your walls and ceiling, even though overall it looks 100% better. Don't feel so bad anymore.
40. Look around. Realize you're actually done this time. Thank your husband for being so hardworking, patient, and wonderful. More rejoicing.
41. You've used only 1.75 of your 4 cans of paint. The good news is that Habitat for Humanity takes donations.
42. Clean all the brushes and bins in your master bathroom sink. Wonder what you're doing to your pipes after two days of dumping latex paint down them. Realize that you own your home and if you FUBAR your pipes, you have to fix them. Hope this doesn't come back to haunt you.
43. Remove the rest of the tape and the plastic sheeting. Realize that you got paint on the trim in more than a few areas and that some of the orange still shows by the floor trim. Decide you don't care since the bed and bedside tables will obscure that area. Discover you got just a little paint on the carpet since you didn't cover all of that, either. Sigh.
    
44. Let the room air out for a few more hours, but know that no way are you going to sleep on the floor for two nights in a row, even if you die from paint fume inhalation.
45. Enjoy your new room for 15 minutes before you start shopping online for new accessories and a new dresser to go with your brand-new color.
46. Eat hamburgers at home with asparagus instead of onion rings on the side. Start talking about going out for ice cream.