fifi’s grafitti

Here’s my latest use for those plastic bags my mom keeps getting at WalMart. I used two bags for each blade of the ceiling fan, attached with clothes pins to protect them while I’m painting. Painting’s a messy job. This is my mom’s bedroom. It’s a lot more work than rooms I’ve done in the past because the ceiling is ten feet high instead of eight feet, and because it is new drywall. Instead of a ceiling that is impenetrable because it’s covered with 5 or 6 coats of paint I have a surface that slurps up everything I roll onto it. My contractor advised me to use “a lot” of primer so that I could then use less paint. I took my time and tried not to overdo it, but my neck is as stiff as Frankenstein’s today from craning it back as I rolled all that thick primer onto the ceiling. Aspirin, stretches, and ointment only help a little. All this pain and I only have about half of the room primed! Today I’ll move the bed so I can get at the other half of the room, and then I’ll tape and caulk so I can prime the other half tomorrow.

The best new tool I bought is a roller grid. It only cost $5.00 and saved a lot of work. You’re supposed to hang it in a five-gallon bucket, but I hooked it over a flat paint tray. It lets you even out the paint on your roller so you get good coverage. I liked it because I could load the roller directly from the 5-gal. bucket it came in instead of pouring paint into the tray every ten minutes. I think this technique also helped me make less of a mess than I usually do.