Painting is a drag even under the most ideal of circumstances but in the case of my interior masonry stucco walls?… Let’s just say I would rather be caught in a biker bar at last call wearing pants made out of bottle caps. My better half and I decided it was time to paint our “white” stucco walls because they were looking a little yellow … and brown. This is the 5th house my wife and I have own in 15 years of marriage and we are highly skilled painters – so we were confident heading into last weekend thinking we could bang this out in a day, maybe a day and a half tops.
Soooooooo wrong.
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This is a look at the stucco wall partially painted. Hopefully you could guess which part is existing and which is new. If not, here’s a clue for you: the new color doesn’t look like “hobo urine”.
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Because we were staying in the house during this period, the paint I chose was Sherwin Williams‘Harmony’ line. This is an interior acrylic latex paint that is low odor, zero VOC paint, and we have used it for the last few interior paints jobs with great success. The smell is almost non-existent and makes sleeping in this room just a few hours after painting a piece of cake. I’m sure that the exhaustion from actually working didn’t hurt either.
Since my walls have a lot of texture and dimension, I went with a flat paint and selected the “Colossus” roller from Purdy. This roller has a huge amount of nap to it which made it possible to paint all the deep crevices in stucco.
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All those crevices is why this painting job just about killed me and my wife. The stucco walls run right up to every edge – which isn’t nice and sharp. As a result, cutting in around door frames, wood beams, wood siding, the floor … was horrible. You couldn’t tape it off because painters tape wouldn’t stick to the rough wood very well. We also had to use a pointillism technique to get the paint everywhere. After 6 hours of “cutting” in, we were barely halfway through.
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See what I mean? That is some nasty business to work around.
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Once the cutting in was finished, the Colossus made quick work of the wall areas.
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Part of the rush to get this room painted was we sold all our old bedroom furniture and upgraded to a king size bed … which was being delivered the same weekend. As soon as Saturday morning came, I had to disassemble all the old stuff and move it out of the room so the people who bought it could come and take it away. As the final piece was being loaded onto the trailer, the new stuff showed up so I barely had time to snap off a few finished product room shots.
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All in it took close to 18 man hours to paint this one room – my back hurts just thinking about it. Almost all the other walls in our house have the same stucco finish and browny-yellow-pretending-to-be-white color and the thought of painting them all makes me want to reconsider my options. If the tape would hold well enough I would have masked everything off and sprayed the walls – avoiding the lengthy pointillism process all-together.
Why don’t I have weekend projects that are described using the words “sitting on the couch watching TV”?
Cheers
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