more paint (sorry)

Painting the hall is starting to eat into valuable gardening time, as it didn't rain today, and I could have been outside.  The showers are extremely localised.  People who went into Colchester tell me it poured, but out here in the Tendring peninsular it didn't.  Still, now I've started painting I've got to finish, what with the top half of the dresser, all the things that normally live on the dresser, and the cats' food dishes and baskets being scattered around the study and kitchen and turning the downstairs into an obstacle course.

Gloss paint takes ages.  I quite enjoy slooshing on emulsion, but fiddling around doing weentsy skirting boards with a half inch brush is not great fun.  You don't realise how grey and tired white paint has got over the years, until you put fresh white paint next to it or over it, and I have realised I am not going to get away with one coat of gloss.  Well, obviously I could.  I could just not paint the hall at all, and it wouldn't make any difference to anything critical.  It isn't like not getting a leak in the roof fixed and then watching as the Stramit board rapidly disintegrates and the entire roof falls in.  The house is not going to collapse because I have grey skirting boards.  But from an aesthetic point of view, one layer of white paint over the grey makes it worse, drawing attention to the greyness without covering it.

At least paint has got easier to handle over the years.  Modern gloss doesn't drip nearly as much as when I first started painting skirting boards, and it is touch dry in an hour.  Touch dry is important when you have cats, whose aim in life sometimes seems to be to seek out wet paint, and rub their fur against it.  We opened the door onto the veranda so that the cats could get in and out of the house without going through the hall, but of course they want to get into the areas I want to keep them out of, and I had to stand a door stop in front of the cat flap.

I'm an idle cowboy decorator.  If I were making a proper job of it I'd take down the rug in the hall and paint the wall underneath it, instead of which I have tied the ends together with string knotted into the fringe at each end, tucked the bottom third of the rug into the pouch made by the two ends and sellotaped pages of The Times over the top of it.  This lets me paint far enough behind it that once it's let down again the unpainted patch doesn't show.  That 's how I did it last time, because I couldn't face taking it down from the wooden batten it's tacked to and then tacking it up again afterwards.  This time round I decided there was no point in painting the entire area that's hidden by the dresser either, as long as I went far enough in behind it for the edge of the unpainted area to be hidden from all viewing angles.  If we were selling, the buyer would have a disagreeable discovery, once the furniture was gone, but we aren't planning to move in the foreseeable future, so that's fine.

Tomorrow will be yet more painting, and really I am running out of anything to say on the subject, but we might go garden visiting after lunch, as the Yellow Book season is hotting up, and Olivers on the south side of Colchester is open from mid-day until 6.00pm.  That's a nice garden, which I visited back in 2006 during a very hot July and should like to see again in a more favourable season.  At this time of year their bluebells should be out.  If we make it then I won't have to compose a fourth blog post on the subject of paint.  The Systems Administrator has just exclaimed that the forecast for the weekend is a shocker, so we'll see.  The current plan is to be there when the doors open, if it's not already raining torrentially, as it's forecast to be worse later.