I’ve Beaten My Own Record
Posted By Judith on 16th March 2015
“You can paint the shower room now” said Peter helpfully. He had just finished re-instating Gladys’s bathroom mirror to it’s rightful place over the new sink, and drilling the holes ready for fitting our beloved blue glass towel rail to the side wall.
He continued, “It’s not a big job, just a couple of coats of white emulsion on the walls and ceiling. Then paint the door, door frame and round the window”. Job done.
Isn’t it funny how the size of a job is often in the eye of the beholder?
True it’s not a big room, but that’s part of the problem. It’s full of ‘obstacles’, shower cubicle, loo, sink, and that makes it difficult to manoeuvre ladders, paint pots etc.
I struggled manfully over several days to position everything in places that would allow a vertically challenged pensioner to reach all the awkward, hard to reach little places, and successfully completed my task with no damage to either the recently installed sanitary ware or indeed the vertically challenged pensioner.
I was ready to say ‘Job done’, but sadly it wasn’t.
I don’t know what Gladys had used to attach her bathroom wallpaper, but whatever it was it was now ruining one of my beautifully painted walls.
Peter said bits of it looked like a ploughed field with it’s deep furrows (he’s prone to hyperbole in such situations). In truth there were lines of brush strokes showing through my ‘roller textured’ finish.
I rubbed it down and then rollered on 2 more coats of emulsion, if anything it looked worse. I could feel myself being drawn to the ‘ploughed field’ school of thought.
Peter decided that it could be the water in the emulsion reacting with the (invisible to the naked eye) residue of wallpaper paste left after we’d scraped the paper off, which was somehow re-hydrating and raising the historic brush strokes to the surface.
Plan ‘A’ hadn’t worked so we needed Plan ‘B’. This consisted of painting the worst affected area with solvent based white undercoat in a bid to ‘seal in’ the paste.Then two more coats of emulsion.
Sadly it didn’t look much better, so we repeated the process. Rubbing down, undercoat, 2 coats of emulsion.
I’m pleased to say that this second attempt seemed to work, but in the process I have beaten my own record of having to paint a wall multiple times which previously stood at 5.
All we need now is some floor covering and a couple of shelves and I really can say ‘Job done’.
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