ListWise

Saturday, October 28, 2006

A Bit of a Problem

So, yesterday I pounded out the north portion of the house above the wrap around back porch. We’ve had two days of cloudless, fogless skies, with little or no wind. This seemed to be perfect painting weather, especially on this north side above the porch that sees almost no sun even on sunny days. The shingles on the porch roof seem to be always damp, and frankly, it’s must be just about the worst place imaginable on the house to work. The west side of the porch was a Cake Walk compared to this.

I wanted to take advantage of the weather so I put in a few marathon days and just got it done. Everything is painted except the trim around the two windows. That is an hours worth of work, at best. Last night I worked until shortly after 6 in the evening putting on the top-coat on the octagon shingles. Around 5:30 or so the dew settled on the porch roof shingles. In just ten or fifteen minutes time they went from grayish black to dark black and everything got a little clammy.

I hate working up there when it’s like that. I start to envision myself sliding off the porch. I rationalize the potential fall by convincing myself that the ground is soft, and if I land right, I may not hurt myself too bad. Besides, even if I do hurt myself, I have good insurance, so it won’t be too bad. I just have to survive the fall. This does little to calm me. The palms of my hands and the bottoms of my feet sweat profusely.

By the time I finished the dew had settled on the fresh paint. Not good. Fortunately, like said, there is no fog. I checked it repeatedly through out the night and never dried. It’s now almost 11:00 AM the next day and the paint still hasn’t dried. There was some minor running near the bottom, in the last area that I finished up, but it’s not too bad.

I’m not sure how this will affect the paint job. I mean, it can’t be good for it, so the question is, how bad is it. I can’t say, because this is new territory for me. I was hoping to finish this up today and be done with it, but I can’t paint the window trim until the siding dries.

It’s another beautiful, cloudless day....except on the north side above the porch.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Damn, that sucks. We've been dealing with some of the same issues, only ours is more about taking a chance that we won't get rain showers and then we do.

From what I've found in researching this problem, the drawback from getting the paint wet too soon after application is a shortening of the paint film's lifespan, possibly early failure, etc. So, it's a trade-off, isn't it? You either paint and give the wood some protection through the winter and resign yourself to possibly having to repaint the area sooner than you would under perfect conditions or you wait and wait and wait for perfect conditions.

We eventually decided to just go for it whenever possible. Otherwise, it would take ten years to paint this enormous house in perfect weather only. One concession we have made is to paint only easily accessible areas during iffy weather so that if we do have to repaint it won't be up in the hard-to-reach places.

Ben Biddle said...

how about BIG mirrors to redirect the sunlight?

Greg said...

Hey yea, or maybe a helicopter to hover overhead until the paint dries.