There are two pacifiers hanging on the wall. There’s a very dark interpretation here that I am reluctant to consider.

Indeed, a man of his substance should think about having something much stronger than a kitchen chair.

Everett’s baby would have been graduating high school when my grandfather (he would have been 100 this year) was still in the crib

There’s a long history of people taking on big projects they don’t actually know how to do properly. This leads to giant messes, and can end up more expensive to fix than if the person had hired a professional the first time.

Typically, this would be the husband/dad in traditional nuclear heterosexual families because of how gender roles used to be even harder to step outside of. But the stubborn refusal to recognize when it’s time to stop screwing up and get help is relatively commonly a thing ascribed to men, and happens to be fairly accurate for men from before gender roles started opening up.

As an example, my dad was notorious for getting a project going, getting halfway through and hitting a wall of inexperience, then doing things half-assed just to get the job done, only to have to have someone else fix his errors later. He often confused his knowledge of some household repair and construction with the ability to know how all of it needed to be done. Like, he replaced the shingles on the roof perfectly, and really knew what he was doing, but fucked up the plumbing in the half bath trying to save money.

Everett here is falling into the trap of assumed competency of a simple task that is deceptively simple. Painting interior walls isn’t particularly complicated, but it does require some skill and knowledge to do right. You dive in like he’s doing, while also having your kid messing around, and the outcome in the image is pretty realistic lol.

She needs to stop bugging him