Some thoughts on operations

A friend proved that she had done house painting by saying that the job itself (ie waving a tinted brush or roller around) was not too bad.  It was the constant shiting (OK I meant 'shifting, but some typos are too good to pass up) of ladders and drip sheets that was a pain.  Spot on!

When doing the ceilings it was necessary to put masking tape around each rafter as well as at the end of each panel.  I estimated this was 25% of the work  When doing the high gutters PUT IN LINK the ladder had to be shifted approximately 10 times to do a 15 linear metre stretch (and would have been more had Frances not identified a strategy to do 3m with 2 moves of the ladder).

Of course that followed the pressure cleaning of the surfaces using the Karcher sprayer purchased for the purpose.  This is illustrated in the header image: it shows that it is a job that is more enjoyable in Summer than Winter. As a friend said, it beats the daylights out of scrubbing the surfaces to get them clean.  Of course in project planning terms this does mean having to allow another stage in the process  - letting surface dry!

We could then include all the packing up after a session and the cleaning of brushes and rollers etc which easily take 30 minutes for each of us.

Did we include all  this stuff in the original plan?  Of course we didn't.  Fortunately we also didn't reckon on getting so obsessive with our efforts.  Thus we are well in front of our timetable at the moment (8 January) and should have it all done by the end of February.
The situation by 20 January is as follows (note that we are now up to 6 stages!):

• Ceiling and joists: completed about 10 January (about on schedule)
• Blue poles; railings, steps etc:  The blue poles ended up being the first job we did.  That was finished before the end of December.  
• We also decided that the low blue stuff would be left until after we have done the deck  in the expectation that the deck work will splatter on the blue.
• Windows etc: A very fiddly job but we are about 70% of th way through that.  Scheduled for end of February.
• Gutters and high Fascia boards: Finished about 10 January.  Scheduled for mid March.  
• Deck: Shifted up in priority to come before the low blue bits.  Not yet started.
  

One of the secrets is definitely doing a solid chunk of work so that you can see how good it looks/  This gives the inspiration to keep on going.