My basement is key to my home maintenance needs
When you’re stuck at home on the first day of a COVID-19 lockdown with not much to do, and you want to tackle a minor home DIY project, but you don’t want to venture out to the big-box store and risk exposure to pestilence, what do you do?
I go down to my basement and check out my paint department.
Backing up a bit: What prompted this post was yet another one of the countless instances of sloppy/incompetent work by my general contractor, as I’ve blogged about before a little bit here.
I had bubble-wrapped the iron handrail for my staircase ever since I moved into my new-construction house while waiting for some additional work to be completed upstairs. The bubble wrap was to protect the handrail and items being brought upstairs from damaging each other.
As I unwrapped the handrail today, I noticed this ungainly splotch in a highly visible area (the picture doesn’t do it justice, it was much worse in person):
My GC’s painter had used a paint roller to paint the handrail, but in this area he evidently touched up the paint with a foam brush. The paint was uniformly nappy from the paint roller, but smooth in this one area.
For small touch-ups like this involving a paint roller and off-the-shelf paint (I saw that the painter had used an off-the-shelf can of Rustoleum flat black), I prefer to use paint from a rattle can to saturate the paint roller. This not only eliminates the need to roll the roller in a paint tray (a messy endeavor that I detest), it also allows a lighter and more even and precise saturation that prevents paint from flying and splattering around in the area to be painted.
So I went down to my basement and pulled from my stash of paint supplies a rattle can of Rustoleum flat black and a paint roller.
For a project like my narrow handrail, I also cut the roller down to just the width of the area to be painted using a hand saw and miter box. This eliminates excess roller width and further prevents paint from splashing around on the sides of the target area. (My GC’s painter clearly did not follow any of these steps, as I had to scrub numerous black paint specks from my white oak floors with liberal amounts of Goo Gone.)
I sprayed the paint roller in a large box to prevent the paint mist from migrating to other surfaces:
The end result looked much better, with no more unevenness in the texture of the paint:
The total time to cut the paint roller and repaint the entire handrail section was about 10 minutes -- probably just a little more time than what it took my GC's painter to screw around with a foam brush.
While people are hoarding toilet paper, I’ve spent the past ~ 15 years building up a mini-Home Depot/Advance Auto Parts/Best Buy so that I’m ready for most DIY projects that might arise. I have sections for plumbing, electrical, paint, A/V, computer, automotive, etc.
It’s not hoarding if everything is organized and serves a purpose, right?
Comments