On painting the chicken house

Most people would call it the chicken coop, but on my dad's farm it's called the hen house or chicken house. Built in 1951, it held about 300 chickens in its day, and my grandmother collected the eggs and sold them to the local egg dealers. She raised enough money after expenses to pay for the family's daily expenses. They made a lot of money over the years, but now the chicken house is used mainly for storage. It hasn't held chickens for probably 20 years now. The building, however, needed paint, so I volunteered to scrape and put on a coat of primer. The building is 20 feet by 40, so it isn't small. I got around most of it in two days with the help of my dad and my son (who swings a pretty mean paint brush, I might add). The building looks brand new, and after my dad replaces a few trim boards and a window or two, it will be brand new again. Painting is not a difficult skill to learn, but it is a skill, and I am ever so grateful to a summer job about thirty years ago where I learned to swing the paint brush, roll a few trays of paint, and make it all look new again. While painting the chicken house I ran into spiders, mice, snakes, bugs, thorn bushes, old tires, unidentifiable junk of various sorts and sizes, and lots of weeds. Painting was only half the job: our first job was cutting down all the unwanted brush that had grown up around the unused chicken house. The weather was lovely, not too hot, not too rainy. The only thing that bothered me about the whole experience was the soreness of my muscles and the creakiness of my bones. All those years don't pass in vain--you've got to pay someplace.