Learning to Paint

By Ken Wadland

Today, an 11 year old taught me how to paint.

Can you form a mental picture of what would happen if the Three Stooges decided to paint a room? Well, keep that thought in mind.

Last month, I put my house on the market to sell. Now that I’m semi-retired, a big, 4-bedroom house is a waste and is too expensive. Unfortunately, it still needs lots of work. I figure that I’ll just keep improving it until it sells. One cheap, easy improvement is to paint any of the interior walls that haven’t been painted in the last decade.

I’ve never learned how to paint. Throughout my career, my rule always was: “unless I enjoy it or the professionals cost more than my time, then I’ll pay someone else to do it”. This made lots of sense when I was enjoying running my own business. I always had far more client work available than I could possibly complete. And, my clients always wanted everything faster.

For example, if I could get in four more hours of work, I’d earn much more additional money than a full day of a professional painter’s time. By hiring someone to do the work, I made more money, the painter made more money, the job got done with professional quality, and the client got more work done. Everybody wins! Why should I learn to paint?

Well, the situation changes now that I’m semi-retired. I’m no longer writing programs; hence, there is no longer a bottomless pit of software development to be done. Suddenly my time is much cheaper than a professional painter’s time.

But, I digress. This story is about my learning how to paint.

I decided to start with a room that wasn’t too critical. My fitness center in the cellar met the criteria quite nicely. The walls were in such bad condition that it was doubtful I could make it look worse. In hindsight, the decision to start there was my best decision of the entire day!

Justin, my instructor, was eager to get started painting. (We had agreed that I would pay him by the hour.) But, before we could start, we had to “spackle”. Now, there’s an interesting word that has never been in my vocabulary. I had no idea how to “spackle”. And, I’m not too sure that Justin knew too much about it either.

We found a partly used jar (of unknown age) of spackle. It was somewhat crumbly; but, having never seen spackle before, I had no idea what it should look like. (Postscript: For the next project, I bought a new jar of spackle. It didn’t look or act at all the same.)

We decided that we should spackle first, to give it time to dry before we started painting.

Well, that was our first (of many) mistakes. I discovered (much too late), that the very first thing to do when painting is to change into your old clothes. In our rush to get the spackle up in time to dry, I had neglected to change my shoes. And, worse, this spackle, from an antique jar, wasn’t sticking to the walls very well.

I have a simple rhetorical question for you: “What is the intended purpose of spackle?” Well, obviously to those who have used it, the purpose is to fill in cracks. Now, another rhetorical question: “What does the tread of a pair of sneakers look like to spackle?” You guessed it. Treads look like cracks. And, spackle loves to fill cracks. My third rhetorical question is: “Have you any idea how hard it is to convince spackle to get out of the treads in your sneakers?” Unfortunately, this last question was not at all a theoretical question.

Although the old spackle didn’t stick to walls very well, it stuck to my sneakers exceptionally well. I knew that whatever spackle I couldn’t get off my sneakers would soon be spreading all over the house, whenever I walked around. After getting what I could off my sneakers, I left the remaining tread-spackle to dry while I changed the rest of my clothing.

Our next decision didn’t turn out too well either. We decided now would be a good time to put down plastic to protect whatever floor didn’t already have spackle on it. Had we started with the plastic, this would have been an excellent idea. We didn’t discover until hours later, that a non-trivial amount of spackle had already fallen to the floor. Now that it was carefully protected underneath the plastic, it was in an excellent place to try to fill in cracks in the cellar floor. (When the job was finally finished, I had an extra task of washing the floor to remove the lovely decorations that the spackle had created on the cement floor.)

Once we managed to get some of the spackle to actually stick to the walls, we started the next step which was applying “blue tape”. The guy at the paint store had said that I needed “blue tape”. Not wanting to exceed his expectations of how stupid I could be, I bought some “blue tape”. As far as I can tell, “blue tape” is just what I used to call masking tape. I guess by making it blue, 3M is able to charge more. Anyway, I now had an ample supply of “blue tape”.

Justin and I masked off everything we didn’t want to paint with this “blue tape”. Justin seemed pretty good at accurately placing the blue tape right along the edge but only as far as he could reach. The ceiling and upper areas were my assignment. I’m not quite as accurate but after a few tries managed to get the edge of the tape close to where I wanted it. Careful examination of the door hinges and other areas that weren’t supposed to have paint, clearly demonstrated that others before me hadn’t been too accurate either.

We now had “spackled”. We had our painting clothes on. We had plastic covering the floor and blue tape covering everything else. Now it was time to finally start painting. Right? Wrong!

Again, hindsight was an excellent teacher. It turns out that I’d skipped two important steps: sanding and washing. Spackle (even ancient spackle) fills in holes but it also leaves bumps. Fortunately, the bumps don’t show as much as the holes did. So, the overall result was still an improvement.

Forgetting about the washing step turned out to be a bigger problem. For most walls, skipping this step probably doesn’t cause serious trouble. But, a cellar wall complete with spider webs is not quite so forgiving. Not washing it creates lots of new problems, such trying to get cobwebs off your painting brush. And, when you step on the step ladder to reach the high parts of the wall, your reflex is to brush the spider web off your hair. This is not a good idea when you have wet paint on your hands.

Speaking of steps, I soon learned that it’s bad to step in the roller tray when it’s full of paint. I also learned that the plastic is indeed leak proof. I now have experimental evidence proving that spilling lots of paint onto the plastic doesn’t cause any problems other than creating a large area of plastic that you must now avoid stepping on for the rest of the day.

After a slow start, the actual painting process went surprisingly well. Justin painted all the bottom parts of the wall. I painted the top parts that he couldn’t reach. We both painted in the middle. As shocking as it may sound, we made a pretty good team for the painting part of the process. The magic of the blue tape gave nice clean edges even when the paint went where it wasn’t supposed to. Once the blue tape is removed, ta da, the evidence of sloppiness is gone!

Now came the cleanup!

It’s a really good thing that modern paint washes off easily, ‘cause we had a lot of stuff to wash off. I’m not sure if paint bothers a septic tank so I decided to wash the stuff off outdoors. At first this seemed like a good idea, until all of the grass and bushes started turning white. Fortunately, wet paint seems to wash off of grass and bushes, too. After lots of washing and then washing again, all of the evidence was gone except that parts of the hose are now white. You can’t really aim the hose at itself.

The nice thing about having never learned this stuff when I was younger is that there’s so much to learn now. The bad thing about never having learned how to paint is that there’s so much to learn. But, there’s hope! Look how much I learned in just one day!

October 2009

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