This article made me think of painting. As in painting the walls of your living room. Looks easy. How hard could it be? Turns out painting is easy if you don't

This article made me think of painting. As in painting the walls of your living room. Looks easy. How hard could it be? Turns out painting is easy if you don't care if it looks like crap when you're done. But if you want it to look good, you'll spend 90% of your time on prep: Moving out or covering the furniture, laying down and securing a tarp on the floor, taking down all the pictures, scrubbing the walls clean, patching holes in the drywall and retexturing, and then carefully masking around the edges of the walls with tape. 90% of the remainder of the time is stirring your paint and carefully painting around all the edges with a trim brush, going extra slow wherever there's a moulding edge that couldn't be masked. There are tricky roller guides that make this faster, but it's still easy to make a mess that requires laborious correction. If you screw up these edges they will ruin the appearance of the room. The next bit of the job is rolling on the big areas of paint in the middle of the wall, which is what everybody sees first. That only takes 5 minutes. Then finally you spend a couple of hours cleaning everything up and replacing the furniture. How hard could it be, indeed.