We’re still working on the kitchen exterior, which seems to be consuming our lives. It’s painful how long this project has taken, because we’re both pretty much bored to tears at this point. I keep saying “we’re getting so close!” only to find that there are ten zillion other small details I’ve managed to forget about.
The back side of the house is now fully sided, scraped, puttied and primed. That means all 3 walls officially look like, well, walls. That’s a big step.
We got a paint match for the robin’s egg blue used on our exterior – it’s pretty close. We didn’t have any old paint to bring to the store, so we pulled a piece of wood off the house for matching. What can you expect?? It’s not perfect, but close enough to run with. We don’t plan on living with the robin’s egg blue for the rest of our lives anyway.
While I finished up the priming, Teague pulled out his new Wagner Power Painter, filled it with blue, and giddily started spraying…. only to be incredibly disappointed with the thing. It doesn’t produce a continous spray (there are weird “hiccups”), and he had to hold it about 3 inches from the clapboard and go over the same spot ten times to get good coverage. The “3 times faster than a brush” claim is terribly wrong, unless ours is just broken. I couldn’t believe how slowly it was going. He quit after about 45 minutes of fussing with it.
Teague also managed to crank an old stop valve off a radiator pipe in the interior. It was rusted to holy hell and not functioning properly. All winter, you could watch steam leak out into the crumbled remains of the old back room; it made my stomach churn as I thought of our massive heat bill. We’ve been cranking on the thing since March, so it was great to see it FINALLY come off. And in one piece!
Yesterday we scheduled an official “day of rest”, though we both cheated a little – Teague snuck out to do some trim work, and I did quite a bit of cleaning/reorganizing. But we still managed to sleep in until 10, AND do a whole lot of nothing for many hours in a row.
Comments, Thoughts, and Feedback
Glad to hear you took a break. Bummer about the sprayer. Every once in a while I think a sprayer would be great, but I may reconsider now!
I bought a Wagner Power Roller, and I came away with the opinion that the entire Wagner company has no business being in business. The thing was crap. It took longer to paint and clean the thing that it did to just roll it by hand. That was for an interior room. I can’t imagine the power painter being any better, it is the same basic technology.
I ended up donating my painter to the thrift shop. What a total load.
Did you guys face nail your siding? Ours is coming in the next two weeks, and then we have to put it up and paint the whole house. We picked the new paint color. Will post pics tonight.
After we purchased our house it became clear that we would have to paint every surface inside and out. On a recommendation, we purchased a Magnum 2800 psi Airless Paint Sprayer Model 232735 for ~$300 and it has turned out to be worth every penny. I don’t think we could have painted our stucco exterior or textured ceilings without it. It takes minutes to spray an entire room. The most time consuming part is taping everything off and cleaning the pump properly afterwards so that it continues to work the next time. A mask is also a must.
Best of Luck,
Anna
Glad to hear others had bad experiences with the Wagner painter tools…… I am seriously disappointed in that thing. We’ll have to sell it to some graffiti artist ;)
Anna, thanks for the recommendation about the Magnum – it sounds great! Maybe we’ll invest when we get around to painting the whole exterior, because that will be a very big project.
~Mindy
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