#662 Painting

Friday, April 28, 2006

I went to the Maritime Museum today, and painted the end wall at the top of the stairs. I like painting walls.

The stepladder was scary. I guess it was safe, but it felt pretty wobbly, and I was standing on it at the top of a long flight of stairs, with a glass-paneled door on the side. My right thumb was pretty useless, because the very first thing I had done was run my thumb over the wood trim, and I got a huge splinter -- bled all over the place for a few minutes.

After I stopped bleeding, I washed the wall, then I taped all around the edges, spackled the holes and where the old paint had peeled, and sanded the spackled spots and the various lumps, bumps, and uneven areas. This all took longer than it should have, because I had to search the work and storage areas to find all the tools and materials I needed. I ended up applying the spackle with an artist's palette knife, but it actually was the perfect implement for small holes.

All that took about an hour and a half for a 10'x12' wall. But the more effort you put into prep, the faster the actual painting will go, and the better it will look in the end.

Then I looked at the paint. The paint Russ had told me to use last Tuesday wasn't exactly the same color as the other walls, but he figured it was close enough (a medium light blue). But when I held the lid, that had some dried paint on it, up to the wall, it looked like it would clash badly with the trim color (medium blue). Unfortunately, Russ and the other staff people had made a run to Staples, so I had to wait for them to come back. I'm not going to paint the wall without final approval on the color.

Russ agreed that the original color choice wouldn't work, and we ended up going with a cream. The actual painting didn't take long at all. Russ said that he appreciated my efforts to do a good job. "Most of the people we get to help just slap it up", which was pretty obvious from the different layers of paint smeared on the adjoining paneled wall and the trim.

It looks good. Looks like a new wall -- not easy in such an old building. And oddly, the cream blends well with the blue on the other walls. You almost don't notice it's a different color. It brightens the badly-lit stairwell.

I must have made 15 trips up and down the stairs (higher ceilings downstairs - long flight), most of those trips carrying stuff, including the stepladder, to and from the workshop at the very back corner of the building, so I don't feel bad about not "exercising" today. I hadn't taken anything to drink, and nobody offered anything, and by 5 pm I thought I'd die of thirst. Lesson learned.

I needed to get gas on the way home, and stop at the grocery store for my every-other-Friday case of yogurt, but there was an accident on the bridge access road, so traffic was terrible. When I finally got to the gas station, cars were lined up into the street. I had to go around another way to get past, which brought me out north of the grocery store, ... and I gave up and went home. I'll get gas and yogurt tomorrow.

Frankly, I'm beat.