painting

In 5 years I'll make another plan

2008-09-16T23:08:02-04:00

Want to know how out of shape you are? Paint your house. Between squatting down to cut in baseboards and torquing your body into dramatic poses while standing at the top of a ladder with a roller, you'll find out. Do it for several days and you'll have lactic acid boiling in muscles you didn't even know you had.

The colors here are a little off because of the flash but, believe me, it looks nice.

Because of my job I had to break the painting marathon of my mudroom, first floor hall, stairway and second floor hall into several evening sessions ending as late as 2:30 in the morning. It concluded this weekend.

I really and truly hate painting. Sure, it takes some technique but on my scale of interesting home renovation tasks, where building a cool hardwood cabinet is a '10' and cleaning up 300 pounds of plaster rubble that the cat peed on is a '1', painting is maybe a '3'... just slightly edging out it's close cousin, stripping paint (a '2.5').

It wasn't all pain and tedium though. I learned that XM's Deep Tracks channel saves its best music for after midnight. I was grooving so much to a Joe Bonamassa live track that I dropped the paint can while cutting in around the ceiling. To add to my troubles, as I started to climb down off the ladder the clock struck 2am. That's when I programmed my Insteon home automation controller to do a safety kill of every light in the house. The only music that seemed appropriate at that point was the Looney Tunes theme.

At least the color was right, which I can't say for my kitchen which is on its fourth pallette. It's exactly what I expected from Benjamin Moore's online Color Viewer. It's called "Beverly Hills" and I got it in a matte finish. I hope that a low luster finish wasn't a mistake for a stairway wall but I didn't want a tall, glossy wall in the stairwell. The color, which is actually pretty close to historic ocre, blends well with both the natural oak trim on the first floor and the stained oak on the second as well as the green and red paints in the living and dining rooms.

The only problem with the color is that I have daylight CFLs inside a yellow stained glass hanging lamp. Yellow on yellow kinda makes you feel like you've got jaundice. Well, I've been looking for an excuse to replace that hallway light.

My nemesis on this project was this stairwell. It's sixteen feet from the steps to that (soon to be replaced) skylight. I may have a shop full of some bizarre tools but one thing I lack is a ladder that expands this tall. I had to borrow a very heavy, articulating ladder from a neighbor. It was like unfolding a 70 pound Swiss Army knife. Sorry, gimme a plain ol' telescopic ladder any day.

With all the fresh paint, the walls suddenly look very naked. I don't have many wall decorations but my intent is to fill them up with old Brooklyn photos. To that end, I've already acquired a half dozen great old photos from sites like Shorpy and the NY Public Library. I just need to get them framed, which I haven't dismissed as a DIY project.

With this paint on, it ticks off the last item in the original renovation plan (which was a Five Year Plan but, you know, scope creep). So why aren't the champagne corks popping? Because it's sorta like Bush's "Mission Accomplished" -- just a meaningless milestone. The war's far from over. I'm still about three years-plus away from actually being done, and that's only if I don't think of something else to do between now and then. Next up is the stained glass, followed by refacing the stairs. Then I've got to rock the basement ceiling and stairway walls, add a banister to the basement stairs I built, refinish the first floor, rebuild the outside entry, lay ceramic tile on the basement floor... yup, another Five Year Plan coming up.

Construction Gibberish

2008-09-09T12:08:31-04:00

It's not complicated enough that a novice DIYer has to learn the skills, tools, techniques and best practices for what is otherwise a simple job in the hands of the All Knowing. He also has to learn the Babylonian nomenclature for the stuff he needs to do it. For instance, last year I was derailed for two days trying to find the name for a particular type of moulding I needed for the wainscot in my master bedroom renovation.

I had the same problem trying to find the rooftop vent "thingie" for my bathroom fan. The not-too-bright helper for the GC I'd hired to rough-in my upstairs bathroom a few years ago had installed the wrong kind. It's not called a "fan vent". It's called an "exhaust roof cap". It took me an hour in Google just to find the correct name for it.

Igor may have known what it was called but not what it was for. It's intended for a pitched roof. I have a flat roof. As a result, this was the source of three years of water leaks which were damaging my pristine walls and kept me scratchin' and fixin' until I sussed out what the problem was. After finding the product (a Broan #636 roof cap) it took three seconds with the literature to find "DO NOT INSTALL ON A FLAT ROOF".

On a pitched roof, the exhaust port (on the right) is oriented "downhill" (I'm sure there's a construction term reserved for that). What happens on a flat roof is that any storm force wind blowing into that port will pop open the lightweight damper and the rain will pour in.
What I needed was one of those vents that looks like a mushroom. You know what I mean. Of course it's not called a "mushroom vent". It's got its own special ConstructionSpeak nomenclature. It's called a "flat roof jack". It took me longer to find the name so I could buy one than it would have taken me to install it.

While waiting for it to be delivered, Brooklyn is once again being hammered by a storm this morning. An hour ago, I climbed up on the roof and stuffed three wadded-up plastic garbage bags into that port. That should, I hope, stop the leak.

In the meantime, I'm selecting paint colors for the entry and hallways.

I bought several 2oz Benjamin Moore color samples and painted them on the wall for comparison. I've decided on a gold-ish color to blend in with the woodwork and also not clash with the deep red and green of the dining and living rooms respectively (not to mention the pumpkin bronze of the kitchen). It's not an exciting color but with all the strong colors I used here I've got to be careful about having a Barnum & Bailey house.

But none of these colors do it for me. They're either too dark, too yellow or too brown. To the rescue, Benjamin Moore's online Color Viewer. A couple of the color samples interested me (#1 and #3 from the right) but I wanted to see them in a paler hue.

I entered their names, picked a sample photo and found the color I want: Lion Heart. I've been burned by online colors before (see the atrocious tub color in my bathroom reno) so I'll get a quart of this first and make sure it works.

For an extra ten bucks, I could have this tool use my own photos. What a great online resource!

Ready for paint? I wish.

2008-09-07T15:56:12-04:00

I'm gonna change the name of this blog to something more relevant, like Life Sucks And Then You Renovate. My apologies to anyone who might currently be using that name. I feel your pain.

It was supposed to be an easy, brain-dead job: just slap up some primer and paint over walls that had already been skimcoated and prepped several years ago. But I quickly got derailed and had to spend a couple of evenings last week dealing with this. That wasn't in the plan, however it's an old house so, you know, what else is new? But it gets better.

I managed to pick the day that Tropical Storm Hanna hit Brooklyn to roll on the primer. Even before the rain the outside humidity felt something like warm chowder. I knew it wasn't going to be a good day to paint but I also didn't want to push this off another week. The last time I did that, a week became eight years.

The priming was uneventful. Painting isn't something I like to do. It's boring and there's way too much bending, climbing and twisting, especially with my back in the shape it's been the past week. Fortunately, my next door neighbor is a terrific chiropractor so he fixes me every evening so I can mess it up again the next day.

Cutting in around the stairwell ceiling was a bitch because it's so high: sixteen feet from the ceiling to the stairs. I don't have a ladder this tall so I borrowed my neighbor's 18 foot articulating ladder. John's ladder is heavy steel and weighs about 75 pounds. Just unfolding that thing is a chore, especially in a confined space with nice, finished floors I didn't want to gouge. I had to put the ladder into three different configurations to get the job done. After I finished, I reminded myself that I had to do it two more times to paint the ceiling and to paint the walls. Yay, fun.

With that hefty ladder sitting on the stairs and me perched precariously at the top, the shopping newspaper monkeys decided to visit and toss their useless garbage at my front door. That always sets off the dogs so I knew what was gonna happen before it happened and braced myself for it. Auggie went nuts at the front door and Jack, my 110 pound black Newfoundland, dove down the stairs to join the barkfest. Problem was, there was only about a foot of clearance between the ladder and the (wet!) wall. I spent the next 15 minutes outside in Hanna cleaning white primer out of his coat. The irony of standing with a garden hose during a tropical storm wasn't lost on me.

Otherwise, I finished priming late in the afternoon and started making plans for Sunday. I was on the phone when I noticed that I'd missed a spot over the bathroom door. No problem. The brush was still soaking in a coffee can. I set up the ladder and took a closer look. It was wet! I don't mean wet with paint, I mean wet with water! The primer had already washed away and I was looking at soaked joint compound. It was right under that bathroom fan vent I thought I'd fixed. [Insert multiple curses here].

This morning, I went up on the roof to look at that vent again. The fixes I made to it last year looked good. No leaks. But I've always thought there was something odd about the shroud on that vent. Everybody else on the block has these mushroom looking vent caps that stand about a foot above the roof. Mine is flat with an opening on the side.

The bathroom exhaust fan was installed by a GC I'd hired in 2005 to rough out my bathroom. He was late for his vacation in Ireland (Strange-But-True fact: all Irish GCs migrate to Ireland for the month of August). He had rushed off leaving his crew to clean up the job. They in turn forgot to add a cap for that roof vent and as a result I had a flood at the first rain. It was like having a 4" roof drain dumping into my bathroom. I called Frank's cell and caught him in a bar in Donnegal. He apologized profusely and dispatched one of his workers to install the cap that day. Unfortunately, he sent the biggest idiot on his crew.

This morning, I Googled on roof vents and saw what I have here. As I suspected, it's intended for a pitched roof, not a flat roof! The open side is supposed to point downhill. Igor, you moron! What should have been installed is something like the thing in the photo. It's called a "flat roof jack" or "mushroom vent".

Anyway, that job is on me. Frank moved back to Ireland, bought a pub and runs a construction equipment importing company in Donnegal now. I can't safely proceed with painting until I get this leaky vent problem resolved. I drove all over Brooklyn today looking for a roof jack to no avail. I found one online. I just hope we don't have any more heavy storms between now and then.

Now, on to the reason why this primer has been sitting on the walls for lo these past eight years. Above the stairway is a skylight. It's original to the house and I hate it. To me, it looks like K-Mart plexiglass. My intent is to remove it, strip the woodwork, remove the muntins and design a new stained glass piece for the frame. It's also unbelievably filthy, thanks to it being in a vented dormer. The problem is that the skylight is inaccessible by ladder. What you have to do -- and this is one reason why it's convenient living on a block full of identical houses where someone's already had to do what you have to do -- is build a temporary scaffold. Just some 2x6s and plywood. That will give me access both to the skylight and the dormer so I can make some waterproofing repairs in there as well.

I didn't want to paint until I got that skylight installed. But I couldn't live with this funky primer any longer. I can always touch up the paint afterward.

Huh? What happened?

2008-09-02T00:57:21-04:00

It started as an easy breezy project -- an (almost) laborless Labor Day. Seven years ago, I scrubbed, scraped, skimcoated and primed the first and second floor hallways. Last year, I did a little more scraping and added another coat of primer. So why have these walls not been painted since I moved in nine years ago? Call it Home Stretch Complacency, Last Lap Crash, whatever. I just never got around to deciding on a color. Primer white was fine for now.

This weekend my intent was to deal with this, or at least add another coat of primer. I narrowed the finish paint down to two colors and had every intention of painting it today. I'd decide on the color at the Benjamin Moore store.

It was gonna be such an easy job, something that this old house doesn't throw at me often. I mean, the walls have been prepped twice. All they needed was a tinted primer coat and paint. But just to be safe I decided to inspect the walls and take care of any nicks and gaps around the baseboards.

I decided I needed a piece of trim to wrap the corner between the second floor wall and the first floor ceiling. This would look better than a plain plaster corner. I had some scrap oak in the shop and a router bit profile that looked right for the application. A couple of hours later, it was up, stained and ready for me to move on. I inspected the rest of the first floor and I was satisfied. Ready for primer.

I knew I had a problem on the second floor ceiling that I needed to fix. Almost exactly a year ago we had a happening here that some of you probably heard about: Brooklyn's first tornado since the 19th Century. I'd primed the upstairs hallway just the week before that F2 twister zoomed by, missing my house by 500 feet. But I didn't miss the torrent of sideways rain which found a void in the flashing around my rooftop bathroom vent. A couple of weeks later I saw that the paint was lifting on the ceiling in the vicinity of that vent. It wasn't bad. It needed about a square foot of scraping. NBD.

But when I started scraping, large thick hunks of paint were separating from the plaster, and they were getting bigger the more I scraped. I was stunned. I kept going until I encountered well-secured paint. When I was done, there was about 30 square feet of wall covering on the floor: a hundred years of paint, mesh tape plaster fixes, my skimcoat job, the works. I stared at the virgin plaster wall muttering, "WTF?!"

How did this happen?? Since I moved in I'd scraped this wall twice, once with a pull scraper over every square inch of it. That wall was solid as a rock last year.

This couldn't all be water damage. The leak wasn't that big and the plaster didn't show any water staining except around the little patch on the ceiling. Besides, I was pulling off chunks of paint as large as a dinner plate several lateral feet away from that leak.

A closer inspection turned up another culprit.

This wall had apparently been wallpapered originally. Whoever had laid on the first coat of paint had removed the wallpaper but neglected to remove the paste. It was there, clear as day. As I scraped I just kept lifting that first coat of poorly-adhered oil-based paint, along with a century of whatever was on top of it.

I scraped off the old paste, washed the wall with TSP and brushed on some plaster binder. Then I spread on joint compound to feather the edges. Tomorrow I'll test it for adhesion. If it looks good, I'll break out my trusty Magic Trowel and skim coat it again.

The lesson here is that no matter how thorough you are with wall prep, you're never sure how solid things are fifty or a hundred years below. Perhaps if I'd really dug at this wall with a sharp scraper last year I would have lifted a small piece of it, which would have started the chain reaction I encountered today.

My Product Review

2007-10-23T13:05:36-04:00

The last product I was asked to review was an in-floor Kryptonite locking system for motorcycles for Motorcyclist mag. I injured my knee tripping on that #*$% lock in the dark. Let's see if I have more luck with the EZ Clean paint brush that Jeannie from Houseblogs.netasked me to check out.

My project was painting my kitchen extension, which still had seven year-old primer on the walls. It's one of those Deferred Completion Syndrome items I was happy to check off the list for this product test.

I didn't have a clue what I would be testing other than it would be a "new painting tool". When UPS delivered the box and I saw what it was I have to admit I was a little disappointed. I guess I was expecting something dramatic like a high tech masking tape product or an ultrasonic paint stirrer. Those are jobs I hate doing. Cleaning paint brushes doesn't really bother me. In fact, I find it strangely cathartic.

I also have to say that I was skeptical when I saw the name. I've got a dusty box full of useless Magic Planes, EZ-Sharps and Miracle Klamps I've bought at tool shows during moments of low brain/wallet coordination. Such product names conjure up images of imminent suckerhood all by themselves now.

After a day of plastering to fix damage from an old leak in the extension's roof, I dove in with another coat of Kilz primer. I had my doubts that the EZ Clean would be as comfortable or useful as my trusty Purdy wooden handled chisel tip brush. For one thing, the EZ Clean brush I got has fairly short bristles (Note: the brush is available with bristles up to four inches long) so I wasn't confident it would hold much paint.

I did the usual latex prep of soaking the brush in cold water for a couple of minutes then shaking out the excess. This helps to keep paint from collecting and gumming up under the ferrule, which is especially problematic with sticky primers. Then I got to work.

I was surprised. The brush did a very good job with cut-ins. I was correct that it didn't hold as much paint as my Purdy, but the shorter bristles gave me greater control. With less paint on the brush there were also fewer drips. I'll gladly trade not having to stop to clean up paint drool for a few more trips back to the paint can. The ribbed ABS handle also has better traction than a wood handled brush. Two points for EZ Clean.

But EZ Clean's primary claim is clean up and here's where I was a bit put off. This isn't the fault of the idea or the brush but an assumption by its manufacturer that we all have garden hoses and places outside where we can let the paint fly. My back yard is covered with brick pavers. I could have cleaned the brush in one of the five-gallon buckets I have here but that's no more convenient than cleaning in the sink.

Which is what I did. There's no attachment for a sink faucet, or at least not for my cheapo Delta, so I tried holding the handle tightly against the faucet, sealing it as best I could with my hands. That was a mistake. Milky white water squirted all over me and the cabinets.

What should be included with this tool is a generic, slip-over faucet attachment like those you get with large humidifiers and portable dishwashers. Even if I had a convenient spot outdoors to clean the paint brush, I don't live in sunny Los Angeles. What do us northern folks do in January when it's 20 degrees outside and the garden faucet and hose have been shut down and drained for the season? What do apartment dwellers do?

I couldn't give the brush a fair test of its ez-cleaning because of this. But I saw enough of it through the geyser shooting in my face to postulate that it probably works pretty well, so long as you have a tight seal at the coupling. I can say that it doesn't give up any quality as a paint brush for this cleaning feature.

But, as I said, I don't mind cleaning latex paint brushes so I doubt I would pay a premium price for this over a conventional paint brush.