In an earlier story, “No Tape Needed,” I mentioned how I started my own painting business. Knowing my limitations, I would only take on indoor painting jobs. I have no issues using a step ladder, but I will not get on an extension ladder if I can avoid it.
I had a few jobs under my belt by the time the events in this story took place. To say that I was feeling confident with painting would not be stretching the truth. I enjoyed just about everything involved with painting.
While my business card and a small ad I had put in a local newspaper clearly read, “Indoor house painting.” I received numerous inquiries to paint the exterior of homes. If the requests were for smaller outdoor projects, like a garden tool shed or a small deck, and if I happened to be in between more extensive projects, I would almost always take those jobs.
Having worked with the public through customer service for just about my entire adult life, I found I’m pretty comfortable working with complete strangers. That is when they come to where I am working. But when my work is actually at their homes, I discovered I had to discipline myself to keep the conversations with the customers as short as possible. Thankfully, most of the requests for my painting services came through word of mouth more than advertising. This helped each customer to have confidence in leaving me alone in their homes to paint whatever part of the interior they needed.
I can honestly say that this period of my life was one of those times where experience came with a few hard-learned lessons. The following is a story of some of them.
This particular project I am about to share was for a couple that had been previous employers of mine. Their house was situated in a wooded area, with a beautiful deck wrapping around just about the entire house. They even had a heated, indoor, Olympic size swimming pool! The house was enormous.
The first time I drove up their long winding driveway, I literally sat in my car staring at their three-car garage doors for a solid five minutes! I was hired to re-stain these garage doors. I had not been told that it was a three-car garage or that the stain was to enhance the wood grain and not hide it. The doors were varnished, not painted. I was in love! Finally, I was hired for a job where I was asked to work with wood that I did not have to hide under colored paint.
After discussing with the owners what they wanted, they left for work, and I set up my work area. This particular job took me a good two weeks to complete. I needed to scrape the old clear top coat off the doors before truly assessing how much sanding needed to be done. As I progressed with the scraping, it was clear that the doors had not been attended to in a while. The clear varnish was coming off in huge pieces. And because there were large sections scrapping off, it meant that there were large sections of unsealed wood that had been exposed to the elements. Sure enough, when I was finished scraping the varnish, I could see that these doors needed total sanding to prepare them for the new coats of stain and varnish.
Towards the end of the job, I was on my four-foot-high step ladder, starting the final coat of varnish to the top of the third and final door, when something swooped by the back of my head. It was large enough that I felt a slight breeze but not so large that I was concerned. There were all kinds of bird species in this wooded area. As I was getting ready to dip my brush into the pail sitting on the little platform in front of me, I felt the “swoosh” happen again. Only this time, it came along my side and not behind me. This was not a bird! And this was not going away! It was a bat, and it was heading to the very place I was working on. I almost fell off the ladder as it landed on the wooden frame that bordered the garage doors. The bat then wriggled its way inside a small hole I hadn’t even seen! The spot was just above the corner edge of the garage door, which was currently about four feet away from where I was!
In the two weeks I had been working on these doors, scraping, sanding, and such, I had not seen any evidence whatsoever that gave any warning that I should proceed with caution. To be truthful, the hole I had just witnessed the bat enter didn’t even look like a hole. At the start of this job, when I was assessing what needed to be done, I did notice the damaged area. It looked like a small crack in the framework around the door. I had decided to leave it alone only because it was not part of the door.
After my heart started pumping again from this unwanted anxiety attack, I forced myself to finish the small area near the now occupied hole in the frame. The experience that came with this lesson was to never assume a damaged area is harmless.
Another experience I learned the hard way started out very innocently from wanting to do my very best for the customer. This job consisted of painting several rooms, including a hallway and their two-story foyer. The couple who hired me had been customers from the plumbing/hardware store I had worked at previous to opening my painting business.
On my initial visit to their home to look at the rooms and give them a quote on the cost, I found we had many things in common, including our belief in God. What a pleasure it was to work for this couple. The rooms were reasonably easy to complete in about a week. Now all I had left were the foyer and the upstairs hallway. When preparing the walls to paint, my habit is to fill in any nail holes and sand them when they have dried. There was a particular part of the hallway where the sheetrock felt softer around the hole I was about to fill. Being as careful as possible, I started to cover a larger area with the caulk, thinking I could make it a bit stronger.
Suddenly, an area of about two feet squared caved in and fell inside the wall! I stood there just looking at this enormous hole, wondering how in God’s name I could fix this. I have never worked with sheetrock as an installer or as a taper. I had only filled in small holes with caulk and sanded them when the area was dried. My integrity would not let me leave this wall the way it was, even if I were to call a sheet rocker and pay them to fix it. It was a Friday afternoon, and I wouldn’t have found anyone even if I had wanted to go that route.
I decided to swallow my pride, call the plumbing and hardware store, and ask how to fix this mess. Thankfully, the guy who answered was someone I had previously worked with when I had been employed there. He teased me about this problem a little and then got down to letting me know what was needed and how to go about fixing it step by step. I ordered the custom-cut piece of sheetrock from him and went down to get it and the rest of the material. The repair would take longer than the rest of the afternoon only because the tape needed to be plastered. No matter how thin a person can get the plaster, it still needs to be sanded. It can’t be sanded until it is thoroughly dried. That takes at least a day. I informed the homeowners that the wall was now a work in progress and would be finished on Monday. Thankfully, they were very understanding about this.
My lesson from this experience was never to take for granted that one job will be like all the rest. Each job should be worked with utmost attention and care!
This last lesson is by far the most bizarre experience I have ever had on a painting job. The customer hiring me was again a previous customer of mine through the plumbing and hardware store. This woman wanted me to paint her entire home. This was a new home that was still in the construction stage. Fortunately, the ceilings had been painted when they had first been constructed. When I looked at the house, my initial reaction was to turn the job down. The house had 14ft ceilings in the bedrooms and hallway. These were twice the height of the standard 7ft in older homes. Then in the main living area, it was all cathedral ceilings, which were 20ft high in this house. As I was starting to tell the homeowner that I did not have a ladder tall enough to reach the top of the walls, she pointed to a 13ft step ladder, telling me that her electrician had left it there. She added that there would be no problem with me using it.
I started the job in the master bedroom as that happened to be the room this ladder was in. it seemed like common sense to start there. When it came time to move the ladder into the main living area, I realized how cumbersome this ladder was. The layout of the house wasn’t helping much either. I closed the ladder and found it too tall to slide upright through the doorway when I tried to bring it through the bedroom door. When I laid it on its side to push it through the door, the hallway was too narrow to turn the ladder to continue down the hallway.
I was now becoming irritated that I had taken on this job, and being the only person in the house, I knew this was not going to be as easy as I thought. I happened to be standing towards the back of the master bedroom and realized that I was looking through a glass-paneled double door to the outside. That’s right! I had forgotten that this master bedroom had a set of French doors that led to an outside concrete patio. The landscape in the back of the house, where the master bedroom was situated, had two sets of French doors and two separate concrete patios. The other patio was off of the dining room! All I had to do was open the French doors in the master bedroom and slide the ladder through the doors out onto the patio. Then it was only a matter of dragging the ladder off that patio, across a short expansion of yard, then up onto the second patio and through those French doors.
I was elated to find it also didn’t take very long to accomplish. Once I was inside the house again, I took a short breather. Then I went into the master bedroom and moved all my painting materials to the dining room.
I was now ready to begin the main living area of the house. The homeowner asked me to not paint the kitchen as they were still working on some of the walls. The dining and living room was my next project. There was no wall separating these two rooms from each other. This was a big area. The house I lived in could actually have fit inside this area. It was that huge.
By this time, I felt that this 13ft ladder was not as formidable as I had initially thought it was. I leaned over and hefted it upright. Since this ladder at the hinge span was wider than my arm, I opened up the left side of the legs, and when I did, the right side opened up just slightly enough that the front and back legs were separated. At the time, I hadn’t noticed. I was struggling to lock the left hinge. When I finally got the hinged locked, to this day, I cannot believe what happened next!
When the left hinge finally locked in, the ladder jumped, pulled out of my hands, and started to lean towards the right. I thought it was falling over. Being as tall and heavy as it was, I stepped out of the way and waited for the crash as it hit the subflooring. But it didn’t fall. When the slightly opened legs of the right side took the ladder’s weight, the legs spread to their fully extended position. Then it kind of pushed up off the floor and pushed the weight back to the left side. Before I knew it, the ladder was rocking its way across the wide-open room. As my jaw fell open, I also realized it was picking up speed and, for all general purposes, looked like it was running across the floor. All I knew was that in the blink of an eye, it was halfway across this enormous room with no indication that it was slowing down. I took off running after it and saw it was heading straight for the brand new recently installed bay windows in the living room! By the time I reached this runaway ladder, I was running at full speed and reached it just before hitting the bay window. I knocked it sideways, and it slammed to the floor!
Lesson learned from this experience…Never, and I mean NEVER, trust an inanimate object to behave!