Pat, Pat, Roll, Roll

The title to this post may be weird but that is the technique we used to paint the Caravan’s (our bedroom) walls. It sounds like child’s play buy it has worked for us! We were virgin painters until Tuesday evening when we tried it for ourselves. That evening, we tried to stick to advice printed on a leaflet M collected from Bunnings and a DIY book we had borrowed from the library. I also tried to imitate the actions of the painters that painted the living room at the end of last year. When we downed tools after midnight, we weren’t very happy with the results. M declared that he would never paint again.

We woke up to a surprise on Wednesday morning. The walls looked surprisingly good after 7.5 hours of drying time. There were a few patches that we weren’t too happy with but we weren’t too bothered because another coat would certainly hide them. That evening, we started on the remaining two walls. We were more confident and spent at least an hour less completing the work. When we were painting around the wardrobe door, we noticed consistent results when we applied the paint with a paint pad before going over the area with a paint roller. The two walls looked perfect even before the paint dried that night.

On Friday, we gave the walls a second coat of paint to finish the job. We started at around 7 pm and we were so confident by then that we got the job done around 9:30 pm. After cleaning all the tools, tidying up and a shower, we were in time to watch my team Carlton losing to Collingwood. Wicked me totally believed that Carlton would definitely thrash Collingwood again and had planned to go to bed in my Carlton jersey to annoy M. Even though Collingwood won, M was too exhausted to celebrate. He wasn’t just physically exhausted but the special duty he has been performing in the last week and a half has also exhausted him mentally and emotionally.

We used Nippon Paint Advance for our DIY painting project. The tint we had chosen is a Dulux one though. I had wanted to use Dulux paint because of its washability but had opted for Nippon because it was cheaper. Because I am asthmatic, my mum was a bit worried that the smell may be a problem especially since we were painting so close to bedtime. It turned out that the Nippon paint didn’t smell much at all. We bought a roller plus tray kit when we bought the paint. The friendly man serving us at Bunnings suggested that we buy an extra sleeve for the roller and we chose one that wasn’t the most expensive. Of all the little things we have bought for this project, the paint pad is my favourite. M chose one with an adjustable global handle. If I get to buy this item again, I would pick the one with a non-adjustable knob on its back. The handle on our one was supposed to give the user greater control but we found the opposite was true in our experience. So we ditched the handle.

While we were busy doing work inside the pigeon hole, something was also happening in the communal area of our building. A team of men returned on Friday to lay the new surface for the communal tennis court. They were here a week and a half ago to remove the old worn-out surface. When M left to perform his special duty in the morning, a man was already working on the tennis court. By the time I came home around 4 pm in the afternoon, a team of men were in the middle of finishing off their work in the tennis court. One man was riding on what looks like a ride-on lawn mower going round and round. That looked fun to me. It can't possibly be a real lawn mower because the surface is synthetic. By around 6 pm, people in our building were once enjoying tennis again. That week and a half or so must have been the longest time the court was not used in the history of our building.

Friday Morning

Friday Afternoon