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!