Painting is Stressful

The heat wave is finally breaking and it felt so good to sleep in this morning. The morning started off slow but then got busier and busier. At first I was only working on the blog, then started multi-tasking by taping off the decks while waiting for pictures to upload. Then it was full on prep trying to get the decks ready for their first coat of paint! There has been much discussion on how to tackle the painting to try and minimize the prep time and taping. But we came to the decision (my idea…) that we should break it up into different stages. We are painting the decks with a two part polyurethane and from what I have heard it is tricky to paint with. It can set fast, show all of your poor painting skills, not to mention show all of the deck’s imperfections due to its gloss. Great. Finally around 6pm, the tape was on and the temperatures were cooler so I mixed up some paint and started on the borders. Once those were done there was still a lot of paint so got part of the roll bar. Still a lot of paint (…expensive paint) and it was getting dark. So I decided to start on another section that had some large areas and would use up the paint fast but only ended up spilling paint on the deck in my rush. At this point, Mike and I were both stepping in paint (spilled and recently painted) and I was getting really tired and really frustrated. I got to the point where I couldn’t work any longer so Mike took over the painting. And this didn’t help the situation too much because he was painting in the dark and I was always pointing out where he got paint on the hand rail or missed a spot…this mixed with already frayed nerves. But the paint finally ran out and we survived. And then went to bed.