Tag: Paint

Categories
Cosmography

Painted Into A Corner

20120914_110718
I think I’m lost

You’re finally clearing out the shed or the cupboard under the stairs – what do you always find? One unfinished tin of every single colour paint you’ve ever used. These things build up – indeed it’s actually illegal just to throw them away. Paint is hazardous waste now. Hazardous to whom or what I am unclear, but I can sort of imagine why it shouldn’t just be poured down the drain. If nothing else, the sewers would look a mess. So what can you do with it?

If you live in Galway City, the simple answer is: Nothing. There is no way of legally disposing of a tin of paint. The city used to offer a facility, but that’s closed temporarily. Temporarily since last October. I quote from the City Council site:

In the interim people are encouraged to use up all paints, clean container thoroughly at which point the empty clean container can be placed in the household recycling bin.

So I did one gatepost in blue, the other two-thirds orange and one-third cream. Then I removed the dried paint residue from those tins with a gallon of white spirit, four hours scrubbing, and some fire. There were still quite a few tins left though and I was getting tired. Was there nowhere else?

I looked to the county, and found that all Galway has turned its recycling over to local commercial interest Barna Waste. Who of course charge for disposal – not a great advert for our new property taxes that, but at least there’s somewhere to go. According to the website, the nearest facility is in Tuam – a town about twenty miles away. But where exactly in Tuam?

I turn to Google maps, but no combination of terms like Tuam, Galway, County, Council, hazardous, waste, disposal and recycling found anything. Well, you don’t expect Google Maps to know where everything in the world is. OK you do. What drove me nuts though is that most searches returned just a single result – every one of them a commercial entity, and frequently nothing whatsoever to do with waste disposal. It was, in short, about as useful as a slap in the face. There have been a lot of changes with Google Maps recently, and I’m not sure they’re for the better.

Much of the blame though must go to Barna Waste. They have a lovely website, with nice pictures of all the kinds of rubbish you can bring to any of their luxurious dumps across the county. Nowhere though do they actually give addresses for any of these, other than their home base. The County Council meanwhile hides the address on a Word document you have to download – and even then the sum total of information is “Athenry Rd”, a seventeen-mile route. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Google has no freaking idea where this place is. Took me half an hour of driving around to find it myself.

By which time it was closed, of course.

Addresses, people. Put addresses on your websites if you want people to visit. I know we live in the Internet age, but some things still actually need to be physically moved. Crap especially.

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Categories
Cosmography

Varnishing Point

Washstand
It looks just like this. Well it will when I’m finished. Or would if I knew what I was doing.

I’ve taken up paint stripping. That’s where you cover yourself in several coats of gloss and dance around on stage with a scraper. No it isn’t.

There was this old washstand hanging around my mother’s house, lookin’ ugly. I’d never restored furniture before, but I was varnishing the window frames and thought “Well it’s much the same job, may as well do this while I’m at it.”

The windows were finished a week ago.

They were nice fresh cedar wood, not caked in ancient brown paint. Actually I mistyped that as “cacked” first and it was better. This table was totally cacked in brown paint. A rub of sandpaper was not going to bring about meaningful change.

So I got me some Nitromors, the popular paint stripper, slapped on the whole tin, gave it time to do its chemical stuff, and went at it with a scraper. I might as well have attacked it with a sandwich.

Am Tip¹: If you’re using Nitromors on an encrusted piece like this, don’t get the “Craftsman’s” variant. No matter how art-and-crafty you’re feeling, use “All purpose”. It’s more powerful, it’s thicker, and it’s whitish instead of clear so you can actually tell where you’ve put it.

Also the scraper I was using flexed far too much for the job. In the end I got two – a multi-purpose painter’s tool that looks like a miniature seaxe, and the even more ferocious shave hook. Now this really was the business. Its one drawback: with its multiplicity of pointy ends it’s easy to damage the wood with it. Or yourself. Or passers-by.

But with it and the new stripper the paint finally began to move. About three layers down I find one of duck-egg blue. My first reaction – who the hell paints a piece of wooden furniture duck-egg blue? My second though was one of admiration. People who have duck-egg blue paint and just don’t care, that’s who. People with a fine disregard for conventions, appearances, notions of taste.

My third was “Glad I have varnish”.

So the chemicals and violence got the worst of it off, but left a sort of muddy patina. Next then, the scratchening; I dug out the old sanding attachment for the drill. Judging by the dearth of compatible discs in the hardware store this is pretty much an antique now, ousted by dedicated disc and belt sanders, but the drill attachment works well enough. Too well at times; while I was still getting the hang of it I managed to scoop huge depressions into the wood. Pretty lucky I’d started on the underside.

But though this does get you down to the grain with a pleasing speed, it’s only much use on flat areas – of which the washstand has few. The turned legs and grooved details will all have to be done by hand. Lord this is going to be a job. Pictures when it’s done.

¹Like a Pro Tip, except from someone who doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing.

Categories
Humour

Watching Paint Dry

Colouring pencils
None of These

Speaking of warships, I’m painting the garden wall today (bear with me) out at my mother’s place. According to the label this is supposed to be a very dark, slightly bluish grey. Slate, in other words. In fact my mother chose it to match the tiles on the roof. Which are also meant to look like slate. On the wall though, it’s coming out the dullest middle grey you ever did see.

Battleship grey. The tension is resolved. Thank you.

It said this colour was called “Merlin”. That seems to make no sense at all, but I was actually there when the name was chosen, in the chemical plant’s creative department. In my head.

“OK, grey. We need another name for another shade of grey. Brainstorm time.”

“Overcast!”

“Decay!”

“Boredom!”

“Depression!”

“Despair!”

“Razors!”

“Come on, there must be some positives. A happy memory from childhood maybe.”

“Woodlice!”

“Did anyone here have a normal childhood?”

“We work in the creative department of a chemical plant.”

“Gandalf! Gandalf the Grey!”

“Brilliant!”

Then the legal department finds that the licensing would cost millions and changes it to Merlin.

I’m just hoping it gets darker as it dries. Otherwise I’ve spent a lot of effort painting a cement wall to look pretty much like a cement wall.

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