Painting spindles

Okay, so I wasn't really fishing. Sorry for misleading you....and for my absence. I have not been fishing for many years. As a kid I enjoyed it. We used to fish with my cousins when we rented cottages at Constance Bay. It was a fun way to spend time: yacking in the rowboat, being away from our parents, catching endless perch and sometimes for excitement, a huge catfish. We also fished when we visited our grandmother in Saskatchewan. She and her husband Joe would take us to fish off a bridge not far from their place in Weyburn. Then we'd go down into their basement where Joe taught us how to clean our catch.

While I have not been fishing this summer, we have enjoyed some time at a cottage with our daughter, her husband and adorable baby. It was a welcome change of scene from the porch building. Actually a neighbour has informed us that if the structure goes right across the front of your house, it is not called a porch, but a verandah so...it's a verandah.

 For a long time people were calling it a deck. With it's sides completely open and a roof overhead it looked like a covered deck. While sitting on it, we felt like we were on a stage. Now, with the railings and spindles in place, it finally resembles what we had envisioned...an old fashioned verandah. This particular verandah has a lot of spindles...128, in case you're wondering. We had originally thought that we would paint the verandah once the structure was complete but the young man who is building the verandah had a different idea. Alex strongly suggested that we paint as he built. That is, we have been painting like crazy to keep up with him. In the end we know he was right. Painting all the pieces separately, on tables, is a lot easier than painting while either stretched up high on a ladder or scrunched down on our knees on the floor.

The climax of the painting frenzy occured right in the middle of the heat wave. We had to paint all the spindles and the top and bottom railings before Alex assembled them and attached them to the verandah. It wasn't just a matter of painting. For each piece we gave it a quick sanding, then spot primed the knots with a shellac based primer, then primed the entire piece. After that we added two coats of paint.

Why we painted the first 100 spindles with a brush I do not know. That was a serious mistake. In case you ever have to paint 128 spindles...go buy yourself a very small roller. It is well worth the $5.00 ! A brush does an okay job but it does streak and it often dribbles on the edge that you are not working on. Then you've got to go back and catch the dribble before it hardens.With a roller there are no streaks, no dribbles and it is 10 times faster. It kills me to think that we put in many extra hours in that exreme heat because of that mistake. Oh well, I'll put that in the chapter...."lessons learned while building the verandah."