See? Genius!
Ok, I wasn't going to be decorating for the entire weekend. Just the daylight portions really. And by decorate, it was more a case of prepare the room for decorating. So I had to drain the heating system, remove the radiator, strip paint off of the walls, apply plaster and/or filler where needed, sand down and apply paint to the area behind the radiator. Replace the radiator and restart the heating system. Then strip the rest of the paint along with filling and sanding where needed. Whew!
Needless to say, I failed. I FAILED DISMALLY!! I am not blessed with abilities in this arena if I'm brutally honest.
Actually, FAILED DISMALLY is probably a bit harsh on myself. I managed to do the radiator bit. However, that took the bulk of the weekend. That paint is a lot harder to strip off than you'd imagine. Certainly harder than I imagined. Ultimately I managed to get the wall behind the radiator painted. I managed to completely strip paint from one wall of the three. Not the biggest of the three, but not the smallest. And large chunks of paint stripped off the biggest wall.
But I was using a heat gun! It's pretty fun! When you fire that baby at some skirting board you literally see the paint start bubbling up. Not so much on the water based wall paint, but careful use did soften the paint up enough to make scraping it off the wall a lot easier.
However, that middle wall took some time and effort with the heat gun and scraper. I blistered the palm of my hand with the scraper. Yep actual blisters, the sure sign of rare manual labour on unmanly hands! And of course when you use the heat gun on the paint before you scrape it, the natural result is that you end up scraping a cloud of superheated paint flakes that then fall back over you hand and drift over into your face. Superheated. In your face. Or in my face in this case. Right into my beautiful face. Thankfully my visage remained un-marred by the small particles of paint-lava but after 6+ hours of this happening the novelty wears off.
Now I don't really wish to portray my lovely fiancée as the type who swans off to resorts leaving me tasks that to be quite frank are some way beyond the physical capabilities of un-manly nerds such as myself. She is now remaining home doing the painting. And I mainly had to do the paint stripping to avoid paying a professional to do it. The cheek of these professionals wanting money for their work! Why can't they make their money by sitting around using big words to pretend they know how to work computers like I do? Anyway, the upshot is she has now been painting my hard stripped patches of walls and it's looking pretty good. Thankfully due to her possessing some taste, we got a really good colour for it and there's a good feeling when you see it coming along so nicely thanks to our own efforts.
Though I'm sorry if your a decorating professional who is suffering in the current economic climate and our bathroom could have been the job that saved your business. Um, yeah, sorry.
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