The Best Sprayed Plans

We moved into our current home late in November, 2006. We’d done some work in the previous months, after my dad moved into a retirement residence and we’d had an estate sale and the house was pretty much empty. The walls got repainted. New flooring was laid in the dining and kitchen area. That sort of thing.

I hadn’t really noticed how badly the paint on the front porch’s wrought iron railing was peeling and that the underlying metal was showing rust. When spring arrived, I started working on it. I was using sand paper to file down the chipping paint, smoothing things out to prepare to repaint. It was a lo-o-o-o-o-ng process. I got a sander to make things go more quickly. Or, rather, not so slowly. Quickly wasn’t really happening.

Then, my brother-in-law bought a grinder. NOW we were getting somewhere. I ended up sanding/grinding off every bit of the old white paint, the bottom-most layer having been applied in 1959. It looked great. The next day or so, it rained, and rust began to show up, within hours it seemed. And, while it’s usually hard to be unhappy about rainfall here, I was relieved when it stopped after a few days, and I smoothed off the new rusty parts, and repainted the railing a nice, clean white. Ta-Dah!

I had assured myself that I would pounce on any new cracked, rust-vulnerable portions of rail that showed up.

Actually, I didn’t exactly pounce. But when several cracked, rusty parts showed up this past summer, I made note of them and promised to deal with it when the weather cooled down a tad. And it did, last week.

I got some sand paper (there were only a few rusty places) and sanded down the problem areas. I gathered a couple of partially used spray cans of white paint from a shelf in the garage. I carefully laid down newspaper below the railing and taped it down with sturdy blue masking tape.

I sprayed the railing until the can of primer ran out of paint, apparently having been almost all used up with some previous project. Not a problem. I had a can of Primer/Paint combination. I shook that one up and kept on working. Until that one ran out.

I really did not want to change from my painting clothes to regular going-out-in-public clothes to go to Lowe’s for more paint. But what luck! I found an unopened can of white primer/paint combination, right there on the shelf. I knew it was full because I had to remove the protective piece of plastic from the spray nozzle. I got right to work and finished up the first coat and had plenty left for a second coat, too.

I went out the next day and trimmed off some leaves from the plants in the flower bed. They’d been in the line of fire from the paint cans, and I thought they might should be cut away, because those whitened leaves were probably not going to be all that important to the plant in their paint-covered state.

Then I removed the paper that had been protecting the section of porch that was underneath the railing …

and discovered that, apparently, I had also spray painted the front porch. Or at least part of it (the part not carefully protected by the taped-down newspaper sections).

I’m hoping that weathering (rain, strong western sunshine, etc.) will moderate the obvious mistake that was made. Maybe people will think it’s some trick of the sun, which really is pretty strong in the late afternoon. If you come to visit, you do not need to mention it, I ALREADY KNOW ABOUT IT!