Paintin' Doors and My First Unregistered Vehicle!

Yesterday, I dragged my step dad down to the house to help us paint the doors.  Everything else in the house has been painted, now it's time to do the doors and baseboard.  We had this grandiose plan to put screws in the end of the door, hang it horizontally, and I would use a handheld sprayer while he cleaned the next door.  Once I was done spraying, we would use two pieces of rope to lift the door by the screws and pull it off and set it on the sawhorses in the back of the shop.  There they would hang by the screws until dry.  Well...you know what they say about best laid plans!

The next morning, he shows up with some lumber and says: "I bought another sawhorse kit so we can do the baseboards as well."  Great!  Let's whip those babies out!  He measures and I cut 4 legs, and we start assembling.  One side done...where is the other one?  "Seriously?  I forgot the second set?"  I guess so.  Now he runs to Wal-Mart (for the first time today) to get another set.  No luck.  Wal-Mart doesn't carry them.  "Well...no matter, lets just get the doors done and I will get the other set for next time.  The baseboards are already primed anyway".

Next we thinned the primer way down, and then put it in the sprayer.  We were able to get through 1.5 doors...the sprayer popping and spitting the entire time before we decided this wasn't going to work.  Now what do we do?

Well...we decide that doing the doors by hand was the next best option.  The only problem is that we got rid of all of our "by hand" stuff when we were done with the kids rooms (we didn't think we would need it again any time soon).  So off to Wally World we go again.

At Wal-Mart we were looking for pads, no not those kind, the kind you paint with!  My step-dad has a bunch of pad brush things that we were going to use because they were just about the right size for the doors.  Unfortunately Wal-Mart only had one pad refill.  We took it and bought another brush that came with a pad.  This should get us going, but we also needed some brushes.  I started looking for a three-inch brush, and found a cheap one that would be great for using and then throwing away (I hate cleaning brushes).  This cost $3.57.  Then I glanced at a pack of brushes...same exact make/model and had a 1", 2", and 3"...the price??? $3.27...ummmm hello.  So I bought two packs of brushes.  This turned out to be a good decision because, the 2" brush was just about perfect...the 3" would not have worked as well.

Now it's time to check out.  We walk all the way up to the front of the store and my step-dad mentions that we should probably see if this pad works on his brush...sure enough, no joy.  All the way back to the paint department to get another full-up brush with pad assembly.  Now back to the checkout line.

At this point it is 12:30ish...and I am getting hungry.  "Should we stop at subway and get some lunch?"  "Sure".  Which we did.  This was also a great time to rethink our strategy of how we are going to do this.  After about 10 back-and-forth ideas later, we decided to simply screw another set of screws into each edge of the door (now we have 4 screws on each door, one per corner) and go ahead and hang it in the same spot.  We then screwed a block that could rotate out of the way to capture the other screws so we could both push on the door from either side without it swinging.  This worked surprisingly well, and you can see my step-dad working with the pad/brush thing on one side of the door in the picture above.

So...5:30 at night we finally get all of the doors primed.  Hopefully just one coat of paint will do the trick and we will have them painted and completely done next Saturday.  Knock on wood!  This week I will make another saw horse, and attempt to get the baseboards painted.  This shouldn't be too difficult and might even be a one-person job.  If that works well, we will only have doors to hang next weekend...which would mean we can start moving in the following week (or possibly the week after depending on a lot of things).

Unfortunately I also have to take care of another redneck item this week.  For whatever reason, we never received a notice in the mail that our camper registration was due.  So now we have a unregistered camper, sitting in front of our house, and the tags were due 2 months ago!  I don't know why we now got a letter saying it was expired...but we did get that one, just nothing prior to that.  Unfortunately the emissions are due as well, so now I have to deal with a 3-day tag, the emissions line, then figure out how and what information I need to take to the DMV in order to get the registration renewed.  It's awfully hard to just mail it in without an official letter!  I guess it will be figured out soon enough.

So there it is, I have turned my shop into a paint booth, and I now have unregistered vehicles in my front yard.  Redneck transformation is still in full swing!