Paint the Fence

A few weeks from now marks our second anniversary of living in our home.  We haven't made any improvements.  It was a new house, so there really wasn't anything that needed to be done.  We simply moved in and started to make it our home.

Aside from a few dings in the walls and finger prints along the banister, the house hasn't changed much.  

However, the yard is a totally different story.  Our front yard has been maintained well, the shrubs and flowers are growing, the grass is mostly green and weed free, the side patch struggles a little more but is presentable, and the back yard is a complete disaster.  Think repo yard.  That's what we have going on here.

Not only is the grass, if there is any left there, completely brown,  and the weeds overgrown and deadly to a bare foot, but there is not a single flower, plant or tree back there to break up the boxy ugliness. And the fence....oh dear the fence was not painted, sealed, or stained and has turned a fabulous shade of ugly grey.

I decided that the backyard overhaul was not something I wanted to embrace this summer but the fence does desperately need attention to prevent it from being the ugly thing that it was and from rotting to death, falling over, and revealing to all of creation our ugly back yard.

So paint the fence.

Easy right?

No.  Not easy.  At least for this paintarded person, it was not an easy task.  

I bought the stain and sealer, some magical applicator wands that the Lowes lady said would make the task so easy, and I headed home to tackle the beast.

2 minutes in to the project the first magical wand broke, the second magical wand didn't fit properly in the bucket of stain which caused some momentary chaos until I could problem solve, and then to polish off my handyman moment the existing magical wand was dumping so much stain/sealer on the ground that I actually sealed my decorative rock for all eternity.  The rocks are now shiny with a golden honey hue.

I race back to Lowes.  Livid.  This was supposed to be a 1 trip job.  And here I am back at the store in the first 10 minutes.  I consult my parental units to talk me down off the painter's ledge and I get back home with a roller, a tray, and a tiny element of calm.

I paint.

I paint the fence, a little rock, a lot of my hands and arms, a little of my legs and seriously...who paints their face?  Me.

As I finished the first side of my fence line I realize.  I don't have enough paint for this.  I should have enough paint.  A 5 gallon bucket should cover 1200 - 1400 sqft.  HA!  Not with me at the other end of the roller.

I press on, determined to get as far as possible to avoid cleaning up the supplies more than once.  As I roll, and splash this sticky gunk all over me, I think my cousin Mike would have a heart attack if he saw this disaster taking place, and my mom would have snatched that roller out of my hands 5 minutes in, then finished the job with the existing paint while I was still cleaning the crap off my feet.

I ran out of paint with 360 sqft left undone. 

I laugh.  That should be just one more gallon, if I were operating at the semi-professional scale obviously required to get that kind of coverage, but to be safe I get two more gallons turning this in to a 3 trip job.

I leave one gallon in the van, so I can easily return it when I don't need it.  (Chuckle chuckle)

I return to the job, paint away, and hey what do you know I have 6ft of fence that shall forever and ever until that hunk a fence falls over be left unstained. Short of stain to finish 6ft of fence. 

That's how I roll.

Literally, I roll so bad that I used 7 gallons of paint and still didn't finish the job.  

I then spent about 2 hours scrubbing my skin and nails attempting to get the stain off.  I give up, paint my nails pink, and decide the honey gold stain just makes me look tan in some places...in a very splattered way.