Painting The Fence

Hello everyone! 😎

April is coming to an end, and I'm trying to find some time to describe an activity I started last month with the idea of finishing it in a couple of days or a week at the latest, but it's been delayed until mid-April. The post about that is a bit longer, and there are more than enough photos, but I've been overwhelmed by this for over a month, so I'll take a breather now.

I was visiting my mother, and the weather was sunny outside. We were having coffee on the balcony. And she tells me, listen, what do you say we paint this balcony railing because it's almost wholly rusted?
Yes, it's true, I replied. It doesn't look like anything anymore, and it's high time we did something about it.

The best thing to do is to sand off the old paint and rust first and then repaint it. There are 12 meters of fence, but that's not so much.
Plan: one day for sanding, one day for primer or protective coat, and then another day or two for painting.
After all, the last time it was painted was forty years ago. And who repainted it? Me, of course :)

OK, I'd buy sandpaper on Friday after work and then sand for another hour or so.
Well, that was my first mistake. After two hours of sanding on Friday, I expected to sand at least one meter of the fence, but it didn't make any difference. It's as if I'm scratching the iron with a toothbrush...

What now? It won't work like this. I have to find something more robust —some iron grinding head that you put on an electric drill—but not until Saturday morning. All right, then. Let me try that.
Still optimistic, I'll go to the shop on Saturday morning and buy two grinding heads: one thicker for flat surfaces and one thinner for the rest.
And I start sanding the rust. I sand, I sand, I look to see if the rust has been cleaned off, and it's almost nothing.

Two hours of grinding passed, and I progressed twenty centimeters along the fence.
I now realize that my original plan had not been a stroke of genius and would all come apart. It took me 12 hours to sand forty centimeters of the fence, a visible part of the day, and I destroyed both iron sanding heads.
And that's a disaster! If I continue at this rate, I'll need more than 20 days to sand.

It rained on Sunday and Monday, so I couldn't do anything, but April arrived at the door with sunny weather.

Let's move forward!
I went to the shop again and bought six more iron grinding heads. I sanded every afternoon after work and made plodding progress...

Then it rained again. Somehow, towards the end of the second week, I reached the end of the grinding.

Finally! After two weeks.
I was an idiot; I imagined it would be a couple of days before the fence was repainted. That's what it's like when you don't know what you're doing.

The next stage is to apply a protective coat, or as we call it, a primer coat. There are also so-called two or three-component paints where no protection is needed. Still, the seller convinced me that it would be much better if each layer were separate to be more durable afterward.

After three days, I managed to paint the fence with primer.

And now the final!
I bought two kilos of paint, I thought it would be enough, but it wasn't.
It's metallic brown, like old bronze, and reflects differently in different lights.
I like it.

I ran out of paint and had to order more because the shop didn't have it. I waited a week, but that's OK. In the meantime, my wife and I worked in the field and planted potatoes.

It took me three days to finish painting. Yes, I have to admit that I got better and faster. 😛

It's done now, thank God :)
It will last at least ten years without rusting (I hope). The cost of the paint and everything else was €250. My time and labor didn't even count.

I would have chosen something else if I had known it would take so long.
For example, an inox (stainless steel) or PVC fence.
The cost would certainly have been higher, around €1000 here, but a team would have come and put up a new fence in a couple of days...

But I'm satisfied because it looks good, well, at least to me.

That was a long story; thank you for your attention.

And here's something else:
There has been a lot of development in Hive core but documentation is outdated and updates are needed. So I invite you to support and vote for Hive devportal updates proposal by Hive account@good-karma.

Support and vote for those exceptional witnesses:
@good-karma, @liotes, @fbslo and @detlev.witness.