by Nathan Stout (of AccordingToWhim.com)
This is the 9th part of my series on renovating my mother’s rent home in Joshua. The previous renters really tore the place up and it is up to me to get it ready again. Most renters have to sign a contact but the people who lived there were friends of my late step dad and never did. He did a lot of modification to the house but he never finished ANY of it. It has been about five months now and I have been going down there for a couple of hours each Saturday to work on the place.
This last Saturday I finally got to go back down there. It has been harder and harder to get down there lately. My mom doesn’t seem to be in any rush but I am getting anxious to get it all done. If you remember I was planning to go down there next to do some painting with the sprayer. Since I figured out how to properly clean it and such I decided it would be best to paint the ceilings.
I got down there and set everything up for using the sprayer and got the paint ready. Well, I had one can of paint I had already started using on the house which was a little less than half full. I had brought a 2nd can from home which I have had for a long time. I shook it up and poured them both into the sprayer hopper. The older can wasn’t as bright as the newer one. This worried me since I have already painted a couple of walls with the white so if I came back and painted the ceilings with this new ‘less than white’ it would show where the newly painted areas were. I went ahead and started painting and said what the hell…
I started painting and noticed that the paint wasn’t coming out evenly. There were thicker ‘lines’ on the left hand side of the spray. Then the sprayer wouldn’t stop running. What happens usually is that the pump will charge the line up then stop and only kick back on to refill the line with air. For some reason the pump would never shut off (like it had last time I used it). I quickly realized that painting the walls with this uneven spray and low spray output (because of the pump) wasn’t going to work. I did however go ahead and paint the ceilings of the little and big bedrooms. You don’t notice the uneven-ness of the paint since it is all textured.
It took me a while to clean the thing out but that was all I did on this trip. For my next trip I am planning on more painting (with a roller this time). I will also be buying a better type of paint. As I have said in some of the previous posts the cheap white I was using covers very badly so I am going to just spend some more to get the better stuff.