Lesson Learned

Posted by Kristin Abraham Oct 15, 2006

Today I was painting my client's house and learned a little lesson that I thought I'd pass along. I needed to paint her closet doors. Now the large doors I had already painted, stretching them across my two saw horses. (Plastic saw horses come in packages of two for under $15 - definitely a purchase worth making for homeowners.) The small cupboards over the closet hadn't been painted yet. There were about six of these doors and they are too small to put between the saw horses.

Previously I've painted things on a drop cloth and sometimes the cupboard doors, or whatever it is, gets stuck to the cloth and will leave a little imprint of the cloth on the item. I didn't want this to happen so I had this brilliant idea to use a bunch of paper bags as the drop cloths. The house has had all of the carpet torn out and the new carpet doesn't come until next week, so I didnt have to worry about spilling or the paint seeping through.

All was fine for the first side. We painted the large inside and the sides, leaving the outside for last. Once the insides had their three coats of paint and the paint had dried I reached to turn a door over and found that it had stuck to the paper bag. We ended up pulling the bags off of all of the doors and then had to sand off the paper bags and the spots around them where the paint had puddled and dried.

Luckily, with my helper (thanks Mom) we got the cupboards sanded in less than twenty minutes and could continue. But at this point we had learned our little lesson and completed the task using actual drop cloths.

The worst part of this whole tale is I know how to do this without leaving cloth prints or patterns and just didn't have the tools and didn't take the time to run to the local Ace Hardware and pick up a plastic drop cloth. I try to always keep a few in my supply box but I was out and hadn't replenished my supply. If you're thinking about painting a similar item, or if you just want to pick up an inexpensive tool that I guarantee you'll find useful at some point, then pick up a disposable plastic drop cloth or two and leave the paper bags at the grocery store.