Another week flies by - Painting

For the past 9 days I have spent many hours in a cherry picker (a JLG technically) painting the roof of my house. Today I bring that all to a close when I apply the second top coat to the last two sections of roof.



Before start talking about the painting, let me say that one of my biggest fears has always been heights. As with most of my fears I don't mind confronting it, so spending probably 50 hours of the past week above 20 ft up in the air has been an adrenaline rush (or maybe that was just the solvents in the paint!).

I have never liked painting a whole lot, so just imagine painting 3000 square feet of roof with three coats of paint (1 primer + 2 top coats)!

Painting a metal roof didn't seem like a big hassle at first, I mean, its flat, right? I bought plenty of paint (I thought) lots of rollers and brushes. The front of the house wasn't too bad, the primer went on with relative ease and the rollers worked well. Then I moved around to the side and realized that the rest of the roof was going to be a completely different story. The reason this was the case is that the front of the house has metal shingles (wonderful stamped metal) which was relatively flat. The rest of the house is what they call "5V" metal, a term you may not have heard before but hopefully this illustration helps: ^-^---^---^-^ , that is the basic profile when viewed end on.

Anyway, the 5v roofing was a lot harder to paint, those double v's and even the single v's were difficult to paint, and brushing in the cracks was a real pain. So my faithful and capable helper, John Abbott, and I began discussing how much nicer it would be if we could spray on the paint, and leaving out the next several hours wasted on getting together a working contraption for painting eventually wound up with a compressor driven spray can with a one quart capacity. (Remember that I had about 7,000 square feet left to paint, all one quart at a time!) With some tweaking and a few other purchases the painting started moving along rather quickly. There were no more difficulties with V's either double or single!

Let me digress for a minute. I misspoke when I said that John Abbott is my helper, and to say that he is my Dad's helper would be to misspeak as well. John Abbott is a good family friend who can do almost any task twice as fast as I can, and normally with much better results! He has been a huge help to me this past week in getting things done, and will hopefully continue to be over the next few months as the house moves right along. He has this uncanny ability to work in almost any circumstance and never get frustrated. He merely chuckles and keeps working. I did find this week that he hates painting more than I do (unless it is with a sprayer).

John Abbott helping me take a couple courses off a chimney.

Jeremiah, my dad and Uncle Tom were also a big help in getting the painting done this week.

Back to the painting, though. 10 Gallons of green paint have been applied to the roof, on top of 8 gallons of primer. Hopefully it will hold up for several years before I have to do it again. I've heard that Rustoleum paint is great stuff. I'll let you know in 5-10 years!