Over the summer, I had the privilege of painting my parking spot as a senior at Riverside Academy but it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

In June, my mom and I came up with the idea to design my parking spot into a stained glass window. So, we began the journey of trying to figure out how we were going to do it and after weeks of brainstorming we finally decided to use rubber door mats that had a wrought iron design on them. Once we figured that out we bought the rest of the supplies and got started painting in the beginning of July.

Once my mom and I started painting we realized that my spot was a right next to a drain, which made an already complicated process even harder.  Once we got the base coat done, my mom and I went back the next night and started to spray paint the stained glass panes using the mats. It was a learning process at first, but once we got the first two panes done we had it mastered.

The only thing we couldn’t master was the heat!  We had only been out there for an hour and we were already exhausted. So we left and went back the next night and got only three more panes done before we had to go home again because of the heat. We went back every night until we were finished with the panes. After we finished the panes, we painted a rose in the middle, which was the hardest part of the whole experience. The stencil we bought didn’t work, so my mom and I painted it mostly by hand. We did the letters next, which was surprisingly the easiest part of the whole experience. Then the only thing we had left was the white border that went around the spot. This proved to be tedious because we had to get the lines straight. In the end they came out a little curved anyway.

Throughout the process we had sprayed a top coat over everything to seal it all in, but this proved useless because when we went back to pick up our barricades and take pictures of the final product, we noticed that some of the paint had already started to peel. So we sped to Home Depot and bought some concrete sealer. Then we came back and repainted all the spots that had started to peel. Once that was done, we got to our actual last step of pouring the concrete sealer on top of our hard work.

I would like to say that I would not have been able to get my parking spot done without the help of my wonderful mother. Thank you mom!

Despite the many trials and errors my mom and I faced during this project, we persevered and got it done. It was a fun memory I’ll always have with my mom and we think it came out great!