Sweat, Paint, and Tunes

Few things make you feel as good about yourself as the occasional weekend of manual labor. Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather lounge around playing the latest FPS game or hanging out on the beach, but that feeling right after completing a large project is pretty rewarding. I was able to savor that feeling recently. My fiancée and my parents came over to paint my place in preparation for her moving in next month. 16 hours on Saturday and another 10 Sunday of nothing but painting. It took me a week to recover!

I patched up the many holes in my walls, removed the ceiling stars the previous owners had in place for the kid's room, and through out a bunch of my old stuff in preparation for the weekend. All that prep made the painting go much quicker, though it was still no small task.

I had never painted before, at least not in a setting where I cared about the result, so there were a lot of learnings that took place. Here are a few of them in case you haven't done much either.

• Use plenty of that blue painters tape. It takes a lot of time to tape stuff down, but saves a lot of time when cleaning up. There is a school of thought that careful painters don't need tape, that may be true, but until you've done a lot of painting, that isn't you.
• Flat paint seems to cover better than many primers or other finishes. I went with flat for the first coat in the room that had the most obnoxious color, and it worked like a charm. A second coat of eggshell took care of the color in a hurry.
• Don't do it alone. It makes a huge difference to have someone one step ahead of you on laying plastic on the floor or helping tape, the more you can keep moving the better.
• Play the latest Linkin Park album LOUD. Good tunes will make you more productive.

The end result of the weekend is a house that looks fantastic. The walls are clean, look brand new, and the entire house reeks of paint. What more could you ask for out of a successful project?