painting: observations and lessons...*

Some steps and measures I sussed out while doing the crazy painting thang...


1. With each coat you put down, do the "detail" stuff first. That means the edges around moldings and fixtures, and corners where walls and ceiling meet. Then you can go to town with the rollers on the wide open spaces.

Y'know, sorta like with your Kentucky Fried Chicken, how you first remove the skin and attack the meat, work around the bone and those bits of cartilage, and pause and look funny at those, like, miniature organ looking bits, and wonder about them, and maybe you're a little grossed out when you consider the whole eating-an-animal situation, just for a few seconds, but then it goes away, right? And you go ahead and tear in anyways, and then, once you've skeletonized three pieces of original recipe, you reward yourself for your hard work with those crunchy greasy salty swatches and chunks of herbed, spiced, and wonderfully fried skin for last, portioned out to go down with your mashed potatos and gravy in the styrofoam sides bucket.

Sorta like that.

Kinda.

Isn't it a little fingernails-on-a-chalkboard when your spork scrapes against the inside of those styrofoam sides buckets? Ack.

2. Even after removing the cover plates for the electrical sockets, tape over the remaining sockets themselves. Then you don't hafta be SO careful around them.

3. When laying down tape, create a tab by folding over the end of the last piece of tape in a long line, or if it meets a corner or hard to physically reach spot. Then you can just pull at the tab instead of digging, scratching, or cutting at it.

4. If you can, move and stack furniture and whatnot in such a way that you get *more* than just two-and-a-half feet of room to move between wall and pile-o-stuff.

5. Put pillows or towels, something that works as a cushion, over the sharp corners and edges of furniture you move to the center of the room. I dinged myself several times on the ends and corners of things—aggravated a fiberglass floorburn I got on my shin at Thursday night league, and gouged a good little core sample out of my right knee, too. Ack.

6. Don't leave any clothes that you might actually need to wear in the furniture items you have jammed together and drop clothed over in the center of the room. That would just be dumb. Yeah... dumb...

7. When removing painted-over tape, if the tape was put down flat on the wall, it will come off as clean as possible on its own. If the tape was put down at an angle to the wall, you should run an x-acto or razor blade along the corner or crease at the edge of the tape, then remove the tape. That'll prevent the tape from taking a chunk of paint-skin with it and leave a pretty straight edge to the paint (provided your x-acto stroke was pretty straight). I did this, and because of some not completely straight corners and edges, ended up leaving some thin strips of tape trapped under the paint. It *looks* fine, but I wonder if it will cause any trouble for the paint, or re-painting, down the line.

8. A slight fever, cold meds, and poor ventilation sure do help make the time fly.

=)




Keep on keepin on~

* Adapted in part from some late night email rambling.