Friday
Dripping Paint
Before you start, you might want to read this story. One of our customer service team members at ConstructionDeal.com, has a “how–not–to–paint” story that will make you cringe.
A few summers ago, Robert and his brother, Carlos, were repairing a property they rent after a tenet vacated. This family had been living on the property for five long years, painting over walls at whim and letting their children have complete creative control with their crayons and makers on the walls. The result was a mess. The walls had been painted over at least 8 times at various points without any scraping of old paint resulting in thick layers caked on the walls.
Over the course of three rainy, humid summer days, Robert and his brother stripped paint to the drywall. In addition to the muggy weather they had one other problem – because the tenet was gone, the electricity had been turned off, so all work was occurring in two bedrooms with no air flow. Robert sums up the experience as painful and it hadn’t even begun.
After stripping, it was time to prime and paint. This took two days. Their father had 7 cans of paint laid out and being in a rush to finish the job and with the muggy, non fresh air – they didn’t realize that 4 of those cans were for furniture. They were colored varnish, the kind containing O-I-L. As luck would have it, those were the cans they decided to start with.
They applied the oil-based varnish on the walls with very thick with rollers and by the time they were about to start on the last wall, their father walked in to check their progress. To say he was unhappy taps the surface. What could they do but wait for the paint to dry so they could re-strip it and start again?
It took four days for the paint to dry. And by dry, that meant it had become a gummy substance. The combination of the weather and the oil resulted in thick drops running down the wall – disaster.
After additional days to strip and paint but the result was successful - two beautifully painted bedrooms, finally!
In total, it took eleven days to strip the old paint, prime, paint, dry, then re-strip and repaint. I hated to remind him, but with a quality painting contractor, this process would take about three days. If you have painting plans this summer, make sure not to use oil-based paints in humid weather and always double check your supplies!
Labels: Construction Deal, Interior Painting, oil based paints, painting disaster
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