Painting A White Picket Fence

We did it! We tackled the less desirable project this weekend..and it was exactly that…..scratch that it was terrible!!! What we both thought would take around 3-4 hours ended up taking the whole day. No exaggeration. We definitely ran into a few speed bumps that probably set back the process by a few hours, and it felt like we were out there forever. I must say though, minus the still dead grass {they just cut it down to do the winter seeding}, the fence looks awesome. Its so crisp and white! Here is how the day went down:

J started without me, I was at work popping people pimples. This is how the fence looked when we started:

You see that photo above where the fence looks like its coming apart? That’s because it was. All because of this little thing – I was seriously contemplating getting a new fence from a company like Hillsborough Fencing, but my partner was adamant that we would be able to bring it back to life with a new lick of white paint.

Melissa Young Photo

You see, Honey likes having friends. And she considers any person or dog walking by to be one. How she says hello, well she simply shoves her head through the fence as far as she can. By her doing this over and over again over the past two years, she has considerably loosened the boards. Which then lets her stick her head out even farther, you see- shes a smart cookie:) Frustrating, but smart! Anyways, we knew that the whole section just needed to be replaced, considering we have tried to repair those boards many times already. J got a new section of picket fence at the good ol’ Home Depot. I wasn’t sure whether to go for a completely different style of fence but I’m pretty happy with my decision. My friend got some feather edge fence panels and her fence looks great so check those out if you want a new fence!

Out with the Honey damaged:

In with the new, as of now, non-Honey damaged:

Completely random thought, but looking at that photo makes me think of something I never have before. I always knew I loved living on the corner, but I especially love it now because of how close the fire hydrant is. We have been watching Rescue Me, and man, after seeing those shows I want to be close to the water people!! Ok, im done with my random tangent.

We are lucky that it was just panel that needed replacing because if it was more than one panel, we would have just gotten an Austin Fence Contractor – Fence Repair & Replacement to do it as would be too time-consuming. Once he replaced that section it was time to paint. Initially we thought we were going to have to sand down the whole fence, but then we realized that would take us our whole freaking life too many extra hours, so we just spot sanded certain areas that needed it. When I got home from work J had finished painting about 1/10 of the outside part of the fence. He said it was going really well, and the fresh white was looking awesome. I was even more excited when he told me that he didn’t even need my help, with only having one paint sprayer and all. As a matter of fact, the only job he assigned me was to bring him out a glass of ice cold water every 8 minutes. You better believe I watched the clock like a hawk, as to not mess up this easy job- and then get assigned something harder! Well, after the third glass of water, the sprayer died. This was our third replacement of this individual sprayer, and when they die, they just die. J took his frustration out on the sprayer by throwing it in the garbage…..so if anyone from Wagner reads this posts your sprayer broke for the third time….grrr.. So we went to plan B. Hand painting the fence. I was all gung-ho about this at first. I thought, oh its not big deal, its nice out, we will just enjoy the day together painting. LIES. ALL LIES. About 30 minutes after we started painting by hand, and had only moved about one section over each, something had to change. I was sweating. It was moving too slow. We needed a plan C.

Thats when J called Home Depot and asked if they rented paint sprayers, since we weren’t in the mood to go out and buy a new one just yet. They said they did and it was about $50 for four hours. That sounded like a good enough deal to us, and he was off to get it. Here was the beauty when we first got it up and running:

Random tip- the best time to paint your fence is when your grass is cut down for a re-seeding. This way the grass doesn’t cover the fence, and it doesn’t matter when you have a ton of overspray on the grass itself. You are not ruining your pretty green grass, just the dead stuff:)

After 8 minutes, it all went to crap. The sprayer started sputtering out paint (that we had already diluted), not putting out anything at all, getting clogged, not keeping pressure and so on. We called HD and talked through it with a guy and he gave us as many tips as he could, but still-it wasn’t working great. It would work for about 1 minute, and then we would have to let the pressure build up again for about 10 mins to get anything more to come out, but then it would only work for less than a minute. Frustration doesn’t come close to how we felt. We first had used our sprayer, it died. Then J used a roller, that sucked for the corners. Then we went in with brushes..time and torture. Finally we had this great sprayer, and it pretty much stropped working after teasing us with its initial performance.

We persevered, used the sprayer when we could get it to work, and I went around with the brush to the rest. This project was started at 11 and we finished at 6:30. Talk about a day. Home Depot was awesome though. When J took the sprayer back in and explained to them everything that went wrong they ended up giving him a refund on the rental. I thought that was really great, because they could have just said “oh its your fault, something you did wrong- not us” but they owned up to it! Go Home Depot!

Next time I think we might pay someone to do it! And of course I forgot to take pictures of the fence all painted and pretty, because lets be honest- I just wanted to get out of the front yard by time we were finished. Pictures coming soon!

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