I spent the majority of this weekend starting to paint/stain the stairs and surrounding walls. Painting is a nightmare, though it’s not really painting that I hate, it’s preparing to paint that I hate. All the taping and putting down paper/plastic to protect the floors and other areas takes forever. I spent about three or four hours prepping on saturday, then about 45 minutes applying the primer. I had to build a piece of makeshift scaffolding that would have made Grandma lose her mind (two ladders, leaning against opposite walls with a 7 foot piece of wood between them).
The next day, I spent another hour or two taping up other areas and covering the half-wall just to make sure. Then, I finally painted the walls. The walls are in bad shape, though, and we should have used flat paint instead of glossy paint, to hide the imperfections. My patch at the top of the stairs totally shows through, so I’m going to have to redo that again (or finally give up and call in a drywall specialist). Otherwise, it looks good enough, I guess. I actually think that removing the tape after painting is worse than putting the tape down. it’s a nightmare and gets all sticky on the paint and sometimes doesn’t want to come out without help from a razor blade. Sigh. I’m probably doing several things wrong. I think it’s only about to get worse, somehow I think staining the steps is going to be a lot more painful than painting the walls was — probably because I care more about how the steps look than I do about the screwed up walls. The steps are all new and awesome, the walls are old and poopy.
This week, I will be spending a lot of time after work prepping the stairs. I have to individually tape/wrap each post, so I can stain between them. I started that on Saturday, and cut all the paper to do it for the half-wall at the top, so it should go fairly quickly.
The only big screw up was putting the pan liner in a trash bag on the porch and not sealing the bag. I came out later and saw the pan liner (which was full of left over primer) had outweighed the rest of the bag and toppled over. There’s now a white spot on my porch about 8 inches in diameter. Drrrrr. Though, now that it’s there, I want to paint that area black, which I feel is something I should have done a while ago.