The painting begins

Belle was primed with 2 coats of white primer on Monday…although not without issues. Monday morning I decided to give my little air compressor another try, a mistake that cost me a couple of hours. This thing was only powerful enough to get one swipe and then I had to wait 3 minutes for it to fill up again. I know what you’re thinking…you already knew it worked like this so why deal with it at all? Well, to be honest I didn’t want to spend the money to rent a bigger air compressor. You can guess where I ended up at noon…Home Depot. The guy there told me that their electric air compressor would do the job with minimal waiting, but I wasn’t having it…I didn’t want to have to wait for anything to fill up…I just wanted to paint. So I ended up with this monster gas powered- $110- air compressor. I even had the other customers helping me…one wanted to make sure that I had a gas can at home. I guess I looked that stupid. I thanked him and told him I was pretty sure I had one since I have a lawn mower. The nice guys at Home Depot loaded up the “mine for 2 days” air compressor and I was on my way. Thankfully we live in a historic neighborhood that has alleys so I was able to pull the truck up to the back yard gate, but there I am all by myself wondering how the heck I’m going to get this beast out of the truck to use it. There is no way, but I’m resourceful, so I just open the gate, back into the yard right up to Belle and start it up. I just hope I don’t paint Joel’s truck.


This puppy was well worth the $110 cause I’m smokin’ now….until my paint gun gets clogged…again. At this point I’m ready to return this stupid thing and get a new one…I’m convinced that it’s broken. But I figure I should call the expert first. It turns out that I should have been filtering the paint first. That little tip would have been good about 4 hours ago. Silly me to think that the paint would be free of “junk” when I bought it. I run inside to grab some pantyhose and filter away. I’m telling you, that made all the difference. At the end of the day Belle looks a million times better and I learned a few lessons on painting. Westinghouse White goes on Tuesday.

I get to work bright and early on Tuesday….a hard thing for me…the bright and early part. I make a quick trip to Sherwin Williams to get some real paint filters…a lot cheaper than pantyhose and I start with the roof. I realize very quickly that with the combination of painting white on white and the sun glaring down and reflecting off of the roof, I can’t see what I’m doing. So I had to run in the house and grab some sunglasses. That made things a little better, but I was still having a hard time. Fortunately, the sides all have grooves for me to follow. Who’s going to see the roof anyway? The paint is going on much smoother than yesterday, but it’s just not a shiny as I wanted it to be. Time to call the expert to see what I can do about this.

Tonight I will tape off the z stripe and tomorrow the green will go on….all before noon or my air compressor turns into a pumpkin. Or maybe it will just cost another $55.