I don’t have a year round winter-proof painting studio here at my house on the river, so every October the paint moving ritual begins. It’s a gigantic pain in the neck, but keeping all my “babies” (paints), from freezing or getting cold, is an imperative, so off to the warmer basement they all go. In the midst of taping loose tops on paint cans and wondering if I really need 15 roller cages, I got a yearning to re-paint the mud room.
I do so love a distraction!
So on Saturday around noon time, I left my studio move as a …”to be continued…”, and began a color improvement for the mudroom. Here’s how it started out;
getting ready
and here’s how it looked yesterday;
saturday
today it’s done!
sunday
The blue is from the new Benjamin Moore Color Stories colors (indi go-go CSP-565) -it looks good, yes? I’ll fill you in on my design ideas another time.
Let’s talk about the caulking. I had packed-up the caulking guns for the move; the crappy guns, and the excellent guns. You know the guns, the ones with spring and a thingy to poke holes in the caulk with. A fancy gun-the pro caulking gun…. (I’d show you a photo, but I don’t know where I put them). No big deal, maybe I’d get away with not caulking.
Haha. Rooms slated for the even fastest and most impromptu paint fix-ups always need some caulking; it’s a paint prep inevitability. Usually it’s the lack of caulk that foils my need to fill stuff, and not a missing caulking gun. FYI, compound, wood filler, plaster, toothpaste or a little extra paint, will all work (for a while) for little fixes. My fix was big. So how do you get the caulking out of the tube without the benefit of a caulking gun?
Here’s how ingenious paint “prepers”, who can’t find their caulking guns on a rainy Saturday afternoon do it.
So here are MY caulking do’s and don’ts:
- Do caulk when you prep a room for paint.
- Do use a caulking gun.
- DON’T get so overconfident in your paint prepping skills that you come to believe you can crack the tube of caulk open by kneeling on it, muscling the caulk out of both ends of the tube at the same time, and smearing it around with your fingers and a rag.
Then again… it does work.
I’m interested to hear about your more foolish paint prep solutions. Come on, I know I’m not alone in this. Like you’ve never used a pancake flipper to spackle? Really.
xxlu
