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This week started and ended with paint.

I felt I had no ideas for collage so I squeezed out some paint and tried some different things. It was fun!

Of course I still had to glue some bits of paper onto the painted surface here and there.

space dog

lost dog

GO, Fish!

laughing heads

Windy!

noxious & toxic

"You could paint a meatball if you painted it with Zinsser first." 

quote found on painting forums, attributed to "an old painter."

Here are the utility shelves with a first coat of primer (the bottom two anyhow). The light is different because I changed the ceiling fixture. When I changed the light bulb a few weeks back I noticed some burn marks on the ceiling and discovered the wires inside the fixture were also a bit crispy. Not good! Probably someone used a high wattage bulb in the 60 watt fixture. I found a new fixture on a closeout sale at Wayfair for $1.06 and snapped it up. It uses two bulbs instead of one for more light. Yay!

The shelves are looking pretty good already. I can barely see the places I patched. I am using Zinsser B.I.N. Primer, the shellac-based product that is the subject of the quote at the top of the page.

Two reasons I chose this primer were a) it has great adhesion without having to sand the surface and b) it blocks stains and prevents wood tannin from seeping through. I'm hoping to eventually paint the stained wood and particle board cabinets and the wood paneled wall in my kitchen, and this seems to be the most appropriate product. It was either this or an oil-based product.

I'm using a 4" wide high density foam roller for the flat surfaces inside the cabinet, and a 2 1/2" synthetic bristle angle brush for the corners. The primer is so thin it's almost like painting with water, so it takes some getting used to.

Now for the "noxious & toxic" part.

B.I.N.  isn't low VOC. According to The Fun Times Guide this stuff has 550 grams per liter of volatile organic compounds compared to about 100 g/l for a low VOC Valspar primer. Because it's high VOC it stinks to high heaven. I wear gloves, goggles and a respirator whenever I open the can.

Cleanup is also noxious. You can use denatured alcohol or ammonia. Ammonia's a lot cheaper so that's what I use. I make a solution of half ammonia and half water and add a few drops of dishwashing detergent. I have used this formula with good results on both my brush and roller. After using the ammonia solution I rinse them in water.

More experiments await.

me and my Arrow

I put a coat of primer on 2/3 of the shelves in the utility room. It's too cold and humid to paint today, so I'm on another project.

It's been two years since I removed all the doors and drawers from my bathroom. I'd meant to re-paint them and re-install them with new hardware, but they've been sitting in the garage all this time. The bathroom cabinets, like the ones in my utility room, had had latex paint applied directly over oil paint, and it wasn't long before the paint started peeling off. This drawer seemed to be the worst of the bunch and was what instigated the cabinet makeover.

I thought it would be a quick job to remove that layer of latex, but it wasn't. I tried using the orbital sander, but it took off too much of the finish, down to the bare wood in places. Sanding by hand seemed way too slow and time-consuming, and I wasn't getting anywhere, so I quit.

Lately though, while removing a wallpaper border, I found my five-in-one tool did a great job of sliding under and lifting the wallpaper off the wall. Today I laid  dropcloth in the living room, brought a few drawers inside, and started scraping. In many places the layer of latex peeled off in strips; in other places it took lots of scraping. Scrape, scrape, scrape. It's a good exercise in persistence.  And me and my five-in-one tool are getting to be friends.

The most time consuming part is cleaning paint out of the routed grooves that border each piece. I am folding 80 grit sandpaper into narrow two inch lengths to slide in the grooves. It's not a big deal I guess, since these doors aren't made of particularly good wood, but I want to save some of the house's original handiwork. I think I have eight more pieces to do. If I can finish one every other day I should be done in just over two weeks.

Spatter serendipity

 

 I had a bright orange envelope I wanted to recycle, and I thought I'd try spattering some paint on it to cover some unwanted advertising. This is where you get some slightly watered-down paint on a brush and tap the brush perpendicularly against a stick or whatever. I had an old magazine open under the envelope to catch the "overspray," and I noticed the spattering looked nice on a dark area of the page, so I decided to do several whole pages like that. Above is one result. The spatters nicely cover the original art on the page while some of the original color shows through. I might use this for Christmas cards. Below, I see lots of little Space-fish swimming through the Milky Way.

This is very, very messy. I spread paper all over my desk and still got spatters everywhere; on me, on my clothes, on the wall. Here's the piece of 2x4 I played with the brush. I feel like the hippie version of Jackson Pollack.