Jackson Pollock's trews (and THE END)

The final image of this project is the trousers I wore throughout.  They ended resembling a work by Pollock from his dribbler phase.  This is now the end of this project and the end of this blog, although I guess it will hang around in the blogsphere indefinitely!

A plan is just one more ...

... thing to go wrong.

We decided that after three years we needed to paint the outside of the house.  In the past our practise had been to hire someone to do this, when we had rented the house out (and thus it became a deductible expense against our rent- and due to the laws about negative gearing against the taxes on our salary also).  This time we couldn't do that so it came down to us to do the yakka.

The first stage of this was drawing up a broad plan, so that we had some targets.  This was seen as a Good Thing since it should keep us motivated with intermediate targets rather than the awesome prospect of spending an entire Summer up a ladder (or two ladders on occasion).

The first part of this was to split the job  into 4 chunks based on the colour of the stuff to be redone:

• Blue bits - essentially the gutters, fascias; supports therefore, and barge boards;
• White bits - the ceiling of the deck including the rafters;
• Window frames and other rusty coloured bits; and
  
• The deck itself.
  

Our target time frames were as follows (note that there are 5 entries here rather than 4):

• Ceiling of verandah and joists: 2 weeks, to be completed by mid January.
• Blue poles, steps and rails etc: 4 weeks to be completed by mid February.
• Wooden window frames etc: 2 weeks, end February
• Gutters and high fascias: 2 weeks, mid March
• Deck: no time set but rated as 'last stage.
  

Step 2 was to choose the colour for the blue bits and to find out what products were available.  We decided to give some action to a Queanbeyan business and headed off to a paint specialist in that fair town.  Obviously a few more people should have patronised them in the past as they were closed up.  So we walked across the road and into Magnet Mart where we spent some time talking to Dean the paint man.

We will get on to some more planning in a further post.  For the time being I'll discuss an urban legend from my youth.  The image to the left gives a hint about this.  Basically we were brought up to belief that Mr Hitler as a painter - with the sneering riposte that he was a house painter not a potential member of the Royal Academy!  The wikipedia article about him seems to dismiss this idea, saying that he was actually a dauber, but who wanted to be an architect.   Since I view architects as somewhere below lawyers (themselves below slime-mould as a lfe form) I am not sure this is a major upgrade.

However this current project has two inputs to the question.

• The first is that if Hitler was a house painter it could well explain his misanthropic and vile nature later in life.  
• Secondly, a person who could plan and organise painting a house should have been able to do a better job of the Russian campaign
  

A plan is more than one thing ...

.. to go wrong.

I always like to cite evidence in support of my positions.  In this case it is Terry Pratchett in 'A Hat Full of Sky".  In this epic tome the Wee Free Men comment "Now we have a Plan, all we got tae do is work out what tae do."

After our conversation with Dean the Paint the next steps were to work out

• how we felt about the blue paint we had chosen; and
• how much paint we needed.

The first step was easily solved by painting one of the purlings for the deck.  This is the part of the paint job which we will see the most.  We got a sample pot of the colour and Frances ripped into a pole outside our bedroom window.  We both thought it looked great, drawing in some colours from the lavender we have got growing here and also there around the place.

The second step involved a fair bit of measuring things and putting them in a spreadsheet to calculate surface areas.  The final stages of that involved:

• guessing how much those calculations were in error (always going to be a greater-than-zero outcome); and
• using the result to determine the volume of paint we needed (with the advice of Dean the Paint using info supplied by the paint manufacturers.

We did this and the bottom line came out to a round $1,000 (after Dean gave us a small - but always welcome - discount).  Needles to say we then came up with a few odds and sods that removed the roundness of the figure.  However we ended up with:

• 30 l of deck paint;
•  8 l of blue paint
• 20 l of ceiling white; and
•  4 l  of stuff for the window frames and related areas.

We had acquired some masking tape but almost immediately found the amount acquired to be inadequate.  As it was the Monday after New Year Magnet Mart was shut so we used the services of Bunnings (presumably under a different industrial agreement) to get some more tape and also gap filler, having had a more detailed exploration of the joins between various elements of the house.

In fact I have decided that masking tape is governed by a variant of Parkinson's law.   It would be worded along the lines of "The length of maskable borders expands to require 1 more roll of masking tape than you have purchased."   It appears that the law renews itself as work proceeds, so that after buying 2 more rolls a third is required.  Purchase that and walk straight back into the store to get #4!

Blue Poles

When we were contemplating the colour that we would use for the blue stuff Frances tried it out on one of the uprights.  It looked rather splendid so we decided it was the go.

The blue colour we chose has a tinge of lavender in it.   This is generated by the presence of some magenta in the mix.  This separates out when the pant isn't stirred a great deal leading to very pretty effects as we stirred it.

Having got one blue pole led us  to start by doing all the uprights as the first part of the project so that they looked consistent. 

 


Apparently some dude by the name of Pollock came up with Blue Poles for the title of one of his works but I reckon ours look just as nice.  I also recall a friend using that as the model for the decor of his dunny (aka Bog/loo/bathroom/kazi).  Not a good place to go after several of his good wines.There will be more of Mr Pollock towards the end of this blog.

Here are some views of how they look with the job done!

Sam, the ceiling needs painting

Those with a long memory my remember a series of cartoons from about the 1970s with that title.  They were a trifle rude (as shown in this recent blog by a professional photographer) and you won't find any of that sort of stuff here, unless of course a chance to portray some rudeness comes along.

We of course knew that the ceiling above our deck needed painting, especially the rafters which were still ni the raw state.  I presume this was due to either:

• lethargy on behalf of all previous owners; or
• some misguided intention to achieve a mock Tudor impact.

I have some empathy with the latter view, having a memory of painting the rafters in the verandah of our house, on Cedar Avenue Brighton SA, black while the tin above them was done in yellow to prevent rust.  Jeez, one does some daft things when young.

Fortunately we are now more mature and planned to do the whole lot in basic white.  I did the flat bits with a roller while Frances (being more precise) does the rafters.

The high blue yonder

This covers painting the gutters etc.

I have already commented on some bits of this stage in reviewing our planning. Most of it was merely tiresome in shifting the ladders etc around.  The final stage of dealing with the gutters and fascias on the Eastern end of the house was quite challenging because:

• it required the ladder to be on full extension (note the bend in it); 
• the ground was very uneven ; and
• a fence around the garden bed there got in the way.
  

Windows are the eyes of the house. (pt1)

The title of this page comes from one of the many real estate agents with whom we have dealt over the years.  If that is the case this house was an albino.  About halfway through the stage Frances commented that she didn't think the woodwork had been repainted at any stage since it had been built: for some of it that means 20 years rather than the 3 years I referred to, which is our period of occupation.  (That now seems amazing: it seems like yesterday we moved in!)

This is how the windows looked before being repainted (but with the masking tape in place ).  There are many little bits of wood and they didn't behave consistently when being redone.  In some cases a piece would soak up paint like a straw in a milkshake.  The piece next door would almost repel the paint.

A further issue was the number of planes (ie faces in the woodwork) that needed to be covered.  In an area of the sunroom which I did there were approximately 16 faces around some of the panes of glass.  To say the least this was very fiddly.    (I only did the high bits of this work, as Frances is more temperamentally suited to 'fiddly work'.  She is however averse to bendy ladders!)

Although the job had some problems the payoff was rather great in terms of the improvement in appearance .  Contrast the image

 to the right with that above.