What the Road Will Give You (or, How to Paint Your House)

The way you approach painting says volumes about what kind of DIYer you are, as well as how you work. There are those for whom painting the house is a painstaking, anaerobic endurance race that can take years. I’m always reminded of the guy whose job it is to paint the Golden Gate bridge. He starts at one end, paints for a few years until he reaches the other end, and then starts over. Or so the story goes. For other homeowners, painting a house is more of a fast-twitch project that could be done in a day if you didn’t have to move the ladders around or wash the paint brushes out.

Over the years I’d guess I’ve painted about a square mile’s worth of walls, both interior and exterior. Perhaps I’m exaggerating—it may have been more like a square kilometer. They’re both hard to visualize conceptually, although I can tell you that a square kilometer is more likely to contain men in plaid skirts chasing grouse across the moor and a square mile looks more like a giant parking lot with giraffe and elephant signs to use as landmarks for finding your mini-van.

The point is, I’ve done a lot of painting. I’ve used brushes, rollers, HVLP sprayers, even Q-Tips in a pinch. I’ve never liked painting much, to be honest, but it sure beats paying someone a lot of money to do what is, after all, one of the more achievable DIY tasks.

When I was younger, I summed up my approach to painting this way: Slap It On. "Go ahead and paint over the spiders," I’d tell people. "If they get away, good for them."

Over one fall weekend in 2002 I painted our entire two-story Victorian house, top to bottom. It was literally pitch dark Sunday night when I finished. I was exhausted but eminently proud of myself. I painted the house the same way the next year, and the paint-sodden spiders scuttled off the walls to relative safety in large numbers. The year after that I did it again, still relying on my practice of using the dullest putty knife I could find to scrape off the old blistered paint (sharp scrapers remove too much failed paint and this can get time consuming).

Eventually, though, I got the point. Painting the house is not something you should have to do every year. “Slap it On” is a necessary strategy if you have to host a high school graduation party next weekend and the walls of your house look like one of those rustic, Country-style plantstands you pay $300 for at a boutique called “Flea Market Fanciness.” In the end, it probably pays to do a bit more prep work. I still take issue with those DIY writers who insist that “Preparation is 90% of the battle.” Believe me, you won’t find any professional painters who say that. I think maybe half is a good compromise.

The last time I painted our house I slowed down and did a more rigorous job on the prep work. I actually washed the siding and trim with a scrub brush and fake TSP (I’m still not on board with pressure-washing my 120-year old pine shiplap). I used a semi-sharp scraper to remove as much of the failing paint as I could get off without breaking a sweat. I even applied masking tape around the windows (don’t worry about removing it: masking tape comes off by itself after about four years, although it does leave behind a stubborn residue).

Then, I did a very uncharacteristic thing: I applied a coat of primer. Primer actually has several important qualities that differ from paint. Most importantly, it sticks better and it blocks stains better. It makes a lousy topcoat though, unless your goal is to make your house look like the ’70 El Camino your brother-in-law has been restoring since the Carter Administration. You can even have primer tinted so it’s basically the same color as the house paint, which should be water-based and flat. Don’t even think about messing around with oil-base. I brushed only a single kind-of-thick-but-not-too-thick topcoat of good quality stuff (plan on $40 a gallon), always channeling the old Johnny Bench spray paint commercial ”No runs, no drips, no errors.”

It’s been over five years since I painted the house and I can see that it’s time to do it again. As I prepare myself mentally for the job, I’m struck by an interesting metaphor. Painting the house is like driving from Saint Paul to Duluth on a summer weekend. You can zip around frantically from lane to lane, darting in and out of traffic like a waterbug. Gas, brakes, gas, brakes, gotta get there now, now, now. Or, you can lay back, pick a lane and take what the road will give you. Settle into the flow. You’ll hit a straightaway where you can make up ground, and you’ll get stuck behind a giant Winnebago towing a 26-foot boat up a steep hill. But relax. You’ll get there eventually and the trip will have been much safer and much more stress-free. That, in my book, is a better result.

So take what the road will give you. Like me. My daughter’s graduation party isn’t for two months yet, so I have all the time in the world.

DIY by Choice

My Father-In-Law owns a tiny tabletop forge. The first time I saw it I had no idea what it was. It looks like a cross between a bench vise and one of those Bunson burners we used back in high school chemistry. He keeps his mini-forge and a stack of slender lead ingots in one of the many workshacks that has erupted over the years on his rambling 200 acres in Northern Minnesota. In his forge Billy casts small lead replacement parts for his Model T.
Back when Billy restored this particular 1919 Ford, you had two options for getting your hands on “spares” (as our British friends call them): find them at swap meets or make them yourself. So he learned to make his own car and tractor parts by casting them or by grinding down other parts or by milling them from raw stock on his metal lathe.
These days you can find hundreds, even thousands, of sites on the Web where an enthusiast can buy any imaginable part or accessory for any imaginable vehicle. Billy knows about these miracles of modern technology. He logs onto his computer once in a while and visits some of them, and he always marvels at the things he sees. They make him chuckle and shake his head. And yet, at 84, he still trundles out to his workshack in the middle of winter and gets busy meticulously crafting parts with his grinders and his MIG welder and his vertical milling machine. It’s not about saving money, it’s just what he does. In the 1940s and 50s and 60s he was a DIYer by necessity. Today, he is a DIYer by choice.
Most of us are DIYers by choice. Occasionally, it makes me a little uncomfortable to admit it. It makes the whole idea of crafting things with your own hands sound a little affected: Especially when you start throwing around terms like “satisfaction” and “accomplishment” and “aglow” and “old school.” We wax poetic about the fulfillment that can only be sculpted with dirty, self-actualized hands. We write entire books (I just finished reading one) that are little but a paean to the unique pleasure of doing things yourself. Reading them, you’d think that we—our generation, that is—have just now, in this most recent decade, invented this crazy new concept of DIY and so now we must crow about it at great volume and with wild-eyed, evangelical zeal. Look what we did! I sometimes imagine that Billy and his like-minded cronies must find us all a bit silly, we handyman-come-latelies.
But they’re smarter than that. They might pass judgment on garlic or punk rock or Euro-style purses for men. But they aren’t going to think less of us because we embark on our DIY projects armed with $250 Lithium-ion drill/drivers and NIOSH-approved respirators instead of home-made lead forges. They get that we are only newer members in the club they’ve been in for their entire lives.
So even if you are brand new to the pursuits of the DIYer, set aside any self-consciousness you might harbor and acknowledge that it’s okay to take pride in your choice to do it yourself. You really are becoming part of a proud tradition and you really will feel a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Plus, you’ll save money, learn new things, live in a nicer place and you’ll never have to spend all day waiting around for a repairman. DIY by choice is a fine choice indeed.