painting the house with Francis Chan and Rob Bell

I took a couple of days off last week to paint the house.  Now, to be perfectly honest, I’ve never painted a house.  I’ve done a little painting using (various rooms in the house, some rough work in the DR), so it is good I have read some paint touch up tips, but nothing on the scale of painting the exterior of our home.  I got some good advice from Dave Porter (local painter who attends our church, and who painted the house before we bought it), so I figured I’d give it a shot.

The first thing that I learned is that there’s a lot of work to do before I got to start putting paint on the boards.  I had to spray everything down with a bleach-water solution to kill mildew/mold. Visit http://waterrestousa.com/fort-lauderdale/ to get best mold remediation services. Then I had to powerwash the house.  (Sidenote:  A pressure washer is one of the ultimate man-toys, kind of like a supersoaker for adults.)  My next task was to sand the surface of every dang board that I intended to paint.  Since Dave told me that I had to wait for the boards to be out of the sunlight, I started after the sun passed the front of the house.  That meant that I didn’t start any actual painting until around 4 pm.  I spent the better part of the next 12 hours on a ladder, precariously balancing a paint can in one hand while I spread acrylic stain over one board at a time with a 2.75 inch brush.

12 hours.  Seriously.  I finished the first coat at about 4 in the morning.  My buddy Ryan loaned me a couple of work lights (and a ladder!) that made the front of the house look like a PennDOT construction area, but I got it done.

And the best part was that the house needed 2 coats!

But the cool thing is that I got to spend about 24 hours listening to Francis Chan and Rob Bell talking about Jesus.  There were lots of times that I wished I was able to take notes, but all I had in hand was a bucket of paint, and Kim made me paint over the notes I painted on the front of the house.

I finished the second coat about 3:45 (yeah, I got faster!) Friday morning, painting through a thunderstorm that rolled in about midnight.  Kim and Lilly weren’t real happy about me being on a ladder in a thunderstorm, but it wasn’t raining on the wall I was painting, so I kept going.

You use different muscles standing on a ladder, holding a paint brush and can than you do in normal everyday activities.  The area between my shoulders still feels weird from bunching my muscles while perched on the ladder.

I don’t know if I’ll be volunteering to paint anyone’s house in the near future, but getting this done gives me a certain amount of satisfaction.  And sore shoulders.