9. Painting, apparently

Previous - 8. I've got nothing

Painting

For weeks I've been looking forward to painting the laundry room when the contractors left. Today I started. I'm already tired of it. 

Painting a room is always a process -- at least if you do it right. First is the prep which is just hard and disagreeable (at best) but you will pay if you don't do it properly. Then comes priming -- at least you're making visible progress now. Then the painting and finally the very satisfying process of doing the final things like removing blue tape and putting door-knobs and electrical outlet plates back on. In the end you have a room that looks perfect, for a while.

Almost none of this applies when you're painting a semi-finished laundry room with a mess of pipes and conduit on the ceiling and old drywall that had never been painted before. The new drywall put up by our contractors should be the easy part but -- for reasons unknown -- they chose to use about 50% purple drywall. If they had put mud over the drywall -- as they did in the public areas -- it wouldn't make any difference, but they didn't because they were only matching the adjacent drywall which was bare. I'll come back to this.

I started out by sweeping all the surfaces clean and then mopping them down with TSP. The TSP (I suspect) compromised the sponge on my mop which then fell off. I had to make a 15 block tour of the neighborhood in an unsuccessful attempt to replace the sponge and ended up buying a (better for my purposes) new mop.

The bottom of one wall is brick which also hasn't been painted properly. I tried using my mop and sponge technique here but it failed completely; I had to hose it down leaving a wet floor. Yes, this is the floor that doesn't drain properly. In fact I discovered it's even worse than I had thought. 

Normally we get at least a few hours of sun at mid-day, but not today. Today the marine layer was thick and misty. This is California summer weather I appreciate... but not so much today. It took forever for the floor to dry enough for me to continue with the priming. For the most part, I'm only putting up primer. A few surfaces were previously painted (by me) with some left over paint from my apartment, and I will restoring them, but otherwise the plan is to go with bright white primer.

This is where I was anticipating my main problem. Getting the primer to cover everything, especially those purple sections. After rolling on one coat on the surfaces I expected to be problematic, and then a heavier coat over everything, I do have something of a problem with some surfaces not being a consistent color. For the laundry room, this would probably be fine, but it would annoy me every time I was down there so I will try to address this tomorrow. 

I will probably try rolling another coat on some of these walls, but I also have enough left-over paint (from my apartment) that I could throw in some new "accent" walls. Not sure about that yet. But this turned out not to be my biggest problem.

I was planning to paint past the new drywall until I ran into pipes or conduit. But when I started rolling primer over these surfaces they started falling apart in large flakes that I then had to knock off the roller. I ended up painting less than I intended and I need to clean up some of these gaps when I finish up with a brush tomorrow. 

And using the roller on the brick didn't work at all. The surface is just too uneven. So that's added to the list of areas that need to be brushed... hello carpal tunnel syndrome.

But that wasn't the biggest unpleasant surprise. I grew up with paint. I still miss the smell of lead based paint and I even like the smell of most modern latex paints, but this primer reeks of ammonia. I'm composing this at a neighborhood pizzeria and I keep getting hits of ammonia. I haven't gotten the scent of ammonia stuck in my nose like this since drafting class in middle school when we used ammonia tubes to make blue-line drawings. This is not one of those odd chemical smells (like creosote) that I'm fond of.

Blog note

This is not the content I was hoping for, but, until I get caught up, I think this is what we'll be getting. Only a few more days, I hope to god. 

Postscript

It's now the next morning and the marine layer is even heavier. The pavement in front of my building is actually damp. I've gone to the Bank Cafe to give the sky a little time to dry-up just a bit, though it's supposed to be even colder today than yesterday. 

Next - 10. More painting