Project People...

We came to Foz wanting to do some practical things for Tim and TaLisa as well as serve in the church. Two months should have given us a lot of time to do a lot of projects but instead we found ourselves having to literally put it on our schedule! So we had one week that we set aside for painting.

A young girl from the church (Jerus) was already coming by before we got here to work on some things for them (tiling the roof, building a shed, etc) and so she came to help us. (actually it would be more accurate to say that we helped her!)

And she was great help!!!!

She not only was a hard worker but was invaluable for information. She had learned all of her skills from her,now deceased, father.

The first day we decided to start without her only to find when she did get here that we had used the wrong paint for the ceiling. We had used water based and we needed to use oil because of moisture here. Remember that nothing is insulated nor is it heated in the winter. Both contribute to the mold and peeling paint problems that they can have here. We also learned on that fateful day that we needed to paint the walls first and then the ceiling. (we are not totally convinced of that one yet!) But who are we to argue!!!

Now, you must remember that we speak very little Portuguese and she speaks about the same amount of English. Sometimes our conversations involved a telephone with a translator on the other end!!!! She did come armed one day with a list in Portuguese and drawings of the different tools we may use in construction and painting. She is an amazing artist! We found it very helpful as well as entertaining! We did make it through and, quite frankly, have had many a good laugh with Jerus. She is a gem. I look forward to the day I can really sit down and joke and laugh with her.

So we took to tackling the wall. Water based paint. Good! After surveying the paint out in the garage we realized that we didn't have enough so we walked down to the local improvement store (remember from my previous post?) Well, they don't mix paint colors at this site but an order was put in for us at the bigger store downtown. We tried to figure out at that point all that was needed for the entire project and get it when we were there. Well, that didn't work and we did make several trips to the neighborhood store! The walls were painted easily although the paint is very different from ours. And the supplies. No drop cloths, no angled trim brushes, no tray liners, etc! But man, the pleasure of seeing those walls painted was worth every second we spent on it!

Well, the walls and the water based paint was the easy part. Now we would move onto ceilings, doors and windows. All in oil. I hate oil and it's mess. But I must say when the job was competed there is nothing like oil to give a smooth and hard finish. It should clean well for TaLisa as we changed all the doors from gray (two shades of it obviously applied at two different times) to white. And there are a lot of doors in this little house! And ceilings - poor Warren got that job of rolling on the paint overhead!

A note about oil paint here. They don't sell it in different sheens. You just add thinner to take away the glossiness. Of course that makes for a runny, hard to manage paint and I am ashamed to say it made for some complaining on both Warren and my parts as we dripped here and there, had it running down our hands and arms, and of course our clothes. We had to take thinner and clean up floors (which are newly painted concrete) and we smelled like paint thinner and oil paint for days. We breathed it for about a week...

Are we glad we did it? You bet!!!! Would we do it again? You bet!
After all we are project people
and the reward in seeing it done was so worth it.

And by the way, I didn't really pick the paint color - TaLisa did - she just doesn't know it. They already had the kitchen painted this nice, light, natural color that I thought would go great with white trim. So we just continued on throughout the house. It's cool, clean and neutral and with the white it now goes with about any other color.

And by the way -

it's a surprise so don't tell.........