Baseboards & Burns

Last night we only got through eight baseboards but we ran out of daylight and bugs starting dying on them. Today, Mom and I went over early and we had a whole strategy worked out. Bob was already working on the bar area and Anne met us there to watch the baby. Mom and I spent an hour or more setting up a spraying area on the south side yard. It was windy so taping a big plastic drop cloth against the side of the house was ridiculously difficult. We covered the air conditioner and put down a paper drop cloth. Everything had to be secured with rocks as well and it still billowed all over the place. By the end of the day the wind ripped the paper out from underneath the rocks.  We tried to roll out a baseboard like last night and tried to paint over one that had been rolled; we decided the rolled out ones looked bad and would have to be done later. We had borrowed a sprayer from a friend but even after it was all hooked up it never primed; meaning the paint was never fully sucked up into the nozzle to continue suction. So hand brushing it was.

We got a pretty good system down. We loaded two 30 foot long baseboard pieces on two sawhorses then Mom used a brush on one baseboard to do the flat part while I did the rounded detail portion on the other and then we switched. It was so hot that by the time we had traded sides and done one coat on each they were completely dry and we could do a second coat! Then we would let it sit for five minutes, move it under the patio to "finish drying"and set up two more. We joked that the time under the patio was just a formality. It took ~20 minutes to get two baseboards up, two coats on and set them out to dry. It was so hot we couldn't put the paint in the traditional paint pan because it was drying and creating a skin across the top. We switched to small cups and it was still drying and chunking up in the five minutes we took to transfer baseboards, even in the shade. We ended up adding some water to the paint and rinsing the brushes in between baseboard sets. The paint was drying on the brushes so fast it was chunking them up too and leaving globs on the boards. But it is hard to wash paint brushes without hot water. We eventually started microwaving bowls of water to try and combat it.

Katherine ran all over the place with Anne. We had brought over her kiddie pool from my folks and she played in that all day. She was in and out of her toy tent, went on several walks and they checked out all the local animals they could find. She got in two good naps and luckily the breeze kept the heat down for her. We on the other hand, were out in the sun the whole time and probably got sunburned. I'm hoping my Native American blood kicks in and I'm just tan.

What took the longest was moving the baseboards into the patio and then later into the house. Although they were completely dry to the touch we didn't want to stack them on top of each other and there are only so many places 30 foot long baseboards can go. We ended up with 16 of them in the dining room, 8 in the family room, another 8 upstairs in the master bedroom and the last 9 that have to be redone outside. Its not easy moving something 30' long. Mom and I had a rhythm worked out though that required us to switch the shoulder it was resting on, backing up, pivoting, bending it left and right and up and down. 

Bob and Anne left in the early evening and then it was too difficult to paint and move things with Katherine on our own. She had discovered that the baseboard bundles of four looked a lot like her balance beam at gym class. Between that and her discovering there were cans and cups of paint everywhere it just wasn't working. Mom left with her and I stayed to keep painting.

Mike got home around 7:30pm and helped paint and move the rest of the boards. He also got the old wood baseboards out of the master bedroom and the kids' rooms. The rest of the baseboards had been taken out by the painters. We went home around 9pm so Mike had a chance to actually see the baby. Since we had gotten home so late Tuesday and Wednesday night we hadn't put her to bed.He didn't see her from Monday night to Wednesday night.

I was working on these baseboards for about ten hours. There were 41 boards total and each was 30 feet long. That's a total of 1230 linear feet and each had at least two coats. And there are still 9 of them that have to have the rolled portion sanded down and repainted. I'm covered in paint but couldn't wash up until I got back to mom and dad's because again, we don't have hot water. I'm trying to just look forward to new floors going in tomorrow.