My Family Spent This Week Painting A Mural Thanking Nhs And Key Workers

We decided to create a mural for our garage door, showing support for the NHS and key workers. It was a family effort spread over a week, slotted in between work, homeschooling and sewing face masks for a local primary school.

We asked our daughter, Solace (12), to come up with a design – we even set it like a school project, with a design brief and everything – go team homeschool! 😊

We washed and primed the garage door, mapped out the key features, using a template for the lettering and then got to work!

As we sat painting, many people stopped for a socially-distanced chat, one of whom was an NHS surgeon, going for a walk on her first day off in weeks. She asked us what had inspired us to create the mural. We confessed we hadn’t really thought about it much, it just felt like the right thing to do, to show our appreciation. She thanked us and told us it cheered her, to see such support.

The next day we spoke to a little girl who looked so proud of her dad the paramedic, then later an NHS hospital worker told me a pic of our work-in-progress was getting “lots of love” on the work Facebook group.

And as each family trundling kids on tricycles slowed to a halt by our drive, we realised that that’s why we did it. For all those people who need to know we are grateful for their work, their efforts and their sacrifices. So the children who are missing their key worker parents, can see how important mum or dad is, to us as well as them. So everyone feeling lonely or low in these interesting times can see we care.

To bring a little cheer – a rainbow. 🌈❤️

We made a timelapse recording of the process and ended up with 10 or 15 minutes of footage, so we spent some time editing out second coats of paint etc.

Watching it back, we felt like it needed a soundtrack and we had the perfect song – Rainbow, by Kacey Musgraves. Solace had been hoping to perform this at the school talent show prior to lockdown, so we already knew she would do a beautiful job. Chris is a longtime amateur musician, so it didn’t take him long to record a quick backing track, a couple of quick vocal takes and it was done.

We are so grateful to all key workers for all their efforts and sacrifices. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 😊

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