Dammit, Jim, I'm An Extrovert, Not A Painter!

In case you don’t recognize the iconic line from the title, here’s a sample.

And, from the original Dr McCoy:

I needed to paint the steps at the cottage. Still structurally sound, they looked pretty rough.

I watched a youtube video to make sure there weren’t any obvious steps I wasn’t considering. The person I watched made it seem like a walk in the park. Scrape off the peeling bits, rough up the not peeling bits with a bit of sand paper, sweep it off, paint it on a beautiful sunny day, accept the praise of your family and neighbors.

I even already owned the exact scraper tool the fellow in the video was using, so off I trotted to Lowe’s to buy the paint.

I should have known I was in trouble when I saw the 60’ish paint counter man’s name was “Jim.” Jim was my dad’s name, and this Jim looked a lot like him.

“Jim, I need to paint my exterior wooden front steps.”

“I know exactly what you need to do,” says Jim.

I left Lowe’s with a citrus gel to spray on the steps, which I would then scrape and clean with the mineral oil I also purchased, then it had to dry, then I could scrape and vacuum some more, then I could finally paint.

As you might expect, the job took much longer than it would have if I hadn’t bought in to Jim’s vision of, “It’s going to take you some time, but you want to do it right, don’t you?”

My brother George told me stories of what it was like to send Dad off to work on a job when Dad was helping out at George’s company in the years before he died.

“Suddenly the customer wants 10 more plugs installed in every room because Dad has convinced them it’s better to not ever have to use an extension chord and you want to be able to move the furniture around the room without having to worry about where you’ll plug things in, don’t you?”

In other words, “You want to do it right, don’t you?!”

These Jims and their work ethics.

I only had 2 days before rain was moving in, so I did the best I could with the time I had available.

As you can see, my hope of mostly matching the light blue/gray of the previous paint missed the mark by a brightness factor of about 50.

It rained like a monsoon yesterday, so I’m praying that the 12 hours the paint had to cure was enough. I’ll head over there later this morning and see if Jim’s insight and my elbow grease ended up with a solid finished product.

I guess I am a painter…and anything else I need to be.