Paint! (Or at least "Primer!")

[galadhir]

Woohoo! After over a week of sanding it down to bare metal using angle-grinders, and then rust-proofing, we put the first coat of paint on the roof this morning. This is actually primer, and it needs another layer of primer, three layers of undercoat and then three layers of what we hope is going to be a lighter, more silvery grey top coat. (Each layer takes 12 hours to dry.)

But we've started, which is something we'd begun to feel we would never be able to do. And it is already so much better than the pocked and blistered, faded rusty red paint that we took off.

Whoever had had it before Son had obviously just painted an extra layer on top of whatever paint had already been there until the paint layer was over half a centimeter thick - the worst roof paint job I've seen in almost a year on the canals. So this is already a thing of joy and my fingers are crossed that in 1+3+3 days it'll be better still.

We now have to get on with taking the paint off the sides and then priming them, one by one. And then taking the paint off the decks and gunwales and priming them. Definitely starting to think that this is more of a four or even six week job than the two weeks we had thought we would need.

Comments

[galadhir]

It really is a lot of work, but as you say, it really needed it. We have taken a lot of rust off and hopefully prevented it from getting any worse for a long time. We've been hard at work since posting this and have now finished one side, but now we have to start on the second one! It's a startling transformation though!