Not much news from the olive farm, have been painting for the last 2 months. Nico can't paint do to the fumes but he does everything else besides sanding (he has asthma and can't take the dust) which is really helpful. The old paint was oil based and I wanted to paint it with a colored paint and the big hardware store and a local paint store both would not mix an oil based paint with color so they told me I had to sand the walls first, ugg. For the white oil based ceiling I bought a very expensive like 20 Euros a pint primer that makes the transition between oiled based and latex but I wasn't going to spend the money to do the whole hallway walls so I ended up sanding them. Even when I painted with the laytex paint I do not think the paint had the same "stick" like it should have but it eventually dried and seems okay. Then for the first time I did stenciling.
I liked the hallway stencil project so when I went to paint an extra bedroom I did some more. Everyboy loves tall ceiling with beams, however when you have to paint those ceilings it is a real project. Up the ladder, tape the beam, down the ladder, move the ladder, up the ladder tape a bit farther, rinse and repeat. Here is the bedroom stenciled wall.
After that I had some remaining painting from when the metal guy Frank (that is what I call him) built the roof over a big part of our balcony. He got all done and then decided he had leftover roof that he could add another 10" so when he welded, of course it burned off the paint that he joined it to, but I got that done. It was built with galvanized steel, all welded on site and Frank says that the ONLY primer that will hold paint onto galvanized steel is Rustolium Galva-something. It is like a resin, you apply it and while it is still tacky you have to paint it quick with paint, so effectively your first coat you are painting the material twice, right away. On all the parts that get the sun, and we have over 300 sunny days a year here, I did the resin primer then 3 coats of a high gloss white lacquer paint which that also is really hard to paint with, it drips all over. In this pic if you look up at the top you can see the extension he added. The whole rest of the structure I painted before he put the roof on. The roof is a sandwich, it is a steel roof formed into Mediterranean orange roof tiles, then 6" of like a foam board insulation, then the underside is white aluminum. Plus he had added another galvanized sheet of flashing about 5" wide all along the wall so I had to paint that to, it was a messy job with that lacquer paint. But the paint is excellent really glossy.
Now the painting project I am on now. The balcony floor is covered in resin and although it is water tight it is dull! It needs badly to be refinished. Plus there is one spot which you can see in the pic that the floor was poorly formed and the water didn't drain. It was like a bowl. To say my husband isn't handy is like a HUGE understatement, all of our marriage I have always done the home improvement projects except for caulking his is very good with a calking gun, I suspect as it is the same skill as using a pastry bag, so how to fix this big concave in the balcony was something I had to figure out. The guy at the hardware store when I described the problem said use SIKA and fiberglass sheets. Nico put on two layers and we figured out that wasn't going to work, we would spend a fortune on SIKA which is 8 Euros a tube. What we ended up doing was buying self leveling cement with some kind of extra strong fibers in them, and Nico mixed that and we just poured it over the SIKA patch we had started. First he did a small test and it seemed like it stuck so we went for it. See how bad it was in the pic?
The really great hardware store could not figure out what was on the balcony to start with based on my description and rudimentary French language skills so she called the SIKA rep and a few weeks later he came out to our farm and looked. He is the one who told us it was a resin and then told us how much of his product to use to recover it, I about died when I looked up pricing on the internet, it was like 5,000 Euros! That was not going to be an option. Finally I found a commercial paint wholesaler who has a resin based paint, that you have to mix in two parts that would stick very well to the existing surface and 700 Euros later, 100 euros a gallon I will finish that project tomorrow. It is a superb paint but I realized that the high gloss was going to be slippery in the rain. I wanted the 700 euro solution vs the 5,000 euro solution so I researched and bought a product called Soft Sand, made in Ohio. It is mainly used on boats so that you don't slip. It is really tiny rubber balls, tiny like a fine sand, you lay down a coat of paint, shake on the SoftSand, the next day you sweep and retain the Soft Sand that didn't stick and then you paint over the soft sand balls that stuck. The rep in Ohio mailed me samples and it is really GREAT STUFF, although very expensive. I like it because it is soft on your feet and you can walk barefoot on it, yet it provided a good grip when it is raining. Sand, even a soft rock based sand, painted in I felt would still be rough on your feet and we have 115 square meters of balcony and back porch. I really really like the soft sand, we made a path from the top of the stairs to the front door and another path to the covered balcony. Off the back porch we made another path as when it's raining and we are working we almost always some in through the back porch.
The house itself is a nice house, nothing luxurious but nice, but there is one room that is really horrible, the guest bathroom, it has 4" cheapo grey square tiles on it. We hired a tile guy who finishes tomorrow and then the plumber comes in on Friday and that bathroom will be completely renovated. We had the tile guy tile over the existing tile on the walls but he had to rip out the old floor tiles as we put in a barrier free shower. I mean this is a TINY bathroom, the old above ground, step up shower was about 2ft x 2ft. By going barrier free and having a shower curtain on the long side it gives more room when the shower curtain is open and you are at the bathroom vanity. On the short side of the shower we bought an 8mm thick anti calc it's called, for no calcium build up on the glass. Here is a progress pic of that job.
