I hate

Add other family members (young and old)

Which also limit the available time you can do decorating without interruption. All our decorating was done between 10pm-12am after work and kids bedtimes. Painting, esp white, is hard in artificial light. Fuck it, never going it again. Ever.

I'm midway through an external job - soffits and fascias. It has taken all summer, most of which I'm blaming on the weather being shit. It has been just as bad as indoors. Having left it so long, the first stage of prep I did was largely rendered useless, but I couldn't be arsed to start again, so have painted over some of the remaining flakey paint, knowing full well it'll look shit again in a year or so. At that point I will pay someone.
Life is too short.

Painting is one of those tasks where I am capable of it but there are others who do it more efficiently and tidily and life is too fucking short.

Also I think when I try to do it I lack the patience and woefully underestimate how long it should take so end up rushing or getting frustrated.

One of the very first summer jobs I had was painting the skirting board for a local new housing development, something like 3 miles of it for 80p an hour.

I love a bit of painting... the prep, filling holes, sanding back everything, sealing plaster, cutting in. I found it all very threapeutic when I decorated our house. Not done any for ages, and now the place looks like a dump. I'd come an help y'all if I was in london town.

Edit: I take the point about kids, though.

I repainted the front door and window frames around it. Did a reasonable amount of prep. Just needed a final coat of gloss on the frames. Never finished it. That was about 5 years ago. The masking tape is still there, glued and dried to the glass. I no longer even register it but at some point need to scrape it all off. The paint seems ok, maybe it never really needed that final coat, I CBA to sand it back now.

I loved doing my boys room when we first moved to our house because I got to paint a big ocean wildlife themed mural over one entire wall. Spent my evenings doing it when everyone went to sleep, but yeah just a normal paint job is a sodding chore.

I am OK with it. It's just finding the time.

The main issue is not having the budget to pay someone good, and not being willing to pay someone who may be shit and still not cheap.

Also most of our walls are lined and have other imperfections, so it seems like a false economy.

Pics please

Modern paint is so utterly shit it makes me cry just thinking about re-painting anything. Modern gloss can get straight in the bin.

'This message was sponsored by the Lead Acetate Promotion Society'.

This is it in the almost finished state. Not painted anything since I was in school, but for some reason thought i'd give it a go!

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This is brilliant.

Beats my attempt, excuse the screenshot of a 14 year old Facebook post.

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Thanks Both.

@snottyotter I really like that!

I love this.

I love this too.

Excellent work.

You're much shorter than I expected.

Emails where someone has clearly copy and pasted some text, but they don't match the formatting so it's in a different font or size.

Emails with formatting. Why are you making life harder for people that use screen readers?

Emails with fonts.

Oh, I see jellybaby is an ally.

This is proper good, nice job

Emails

Top tip: between coats of the same colour, wrap your roller in cling film after scraping most of the paint off, saving the arse-ache of using 200 gallons of water trying to get the roller clean.

Trying being the key word. Twenty million trillion billion gazillion gallons of water won’t get rid of it all.