Not all of my odd jobs turned out well. Some turned out disastrously. One of the most infamous ones was when our family tried our luck at painting cottages.
By then we had built ourselves reps as kids that would work at anything. When a neighbor approached us about painting his cherished lakeside cottage, we figured…how hard can it be? The money was good. Why not?
We looked at the job and the six of us. The bulk of the building would be bright yellow, the trim dark green (we didn’t choose the colors). So we figured the painting would go quicker if we split the job with the older kids painting the big sections yellow and the younger kids painting the trim green.
Mistake.
My younger siblings did not have the hand-eye coordination or patience to keep the paint on the trim. When we finally noticed things going horribly wrong (well into the job), we tried to paint over the dark green with the yellow. It took us about fifteen coats to cover the darker color and frankly it never did look nice.
Our paint budget ran over. Our time to finish the painting ran over. Our client dropped by to see how it was going and had a not so minor, yet well deserved freak out.
It was our first and last gig as cottage painters.
Learning
Simple projects are not simple when you don’t know what you’re doing. We should have asked for advice or investigated more before taking on the job.
Testing is important. If we had first tested our technique on a small part of the building, instead of rolling our method out on the complete job, we would have saved a lot of time and hassle. Who knows. Our client might still even have his hair.
Critical jobs go to the higher skilled. First we should have realized that the trim was the most critical task of all those needing to be done. And second, that critical task should have been assigned to the most experienced and careful painter.