"Be Prepared..."

Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts, 1857-1941


Again, I've not been here for a while! It seems that I've got a little too hung up on preparation, and not hung up enough on progress!

Allow me to explain.

Since last week. I've been out and bought the following

• Sandpaper
• Spray Gun
• Oil-based primer, tinted blue
• Face mask (don't want to be poisoned by my wood preserver)

amongst other things anyway.

In the meantime, I've been doing little things with the TARDIS itself. Filling, sanding, filling, sanding again.

I also took some time to try and seal some of the gaps using this expanding foam stuff that is so truly horrible to use, I've vowed never to use it again! This stuff is so damn sticky, if you get some on your hands it takes quite literally hours to remove it - and that's despite using any solvent I could lay my hands on (and generally they stuck to it too!).

Anyway, after what seemed like the upteenth time of filling and sanding, I had an epiphany!

This is a TARDIS. It is supposed to look like an aging police box. Aging police boxes don't have nice smooth surfaces - they will be dented, bashed, smashed in places, dirty etc, etc,etc.

All this time, I've been striving for a perfection that I not only find impossible to achieve, it is wholly inappropriate for it to be that "perfect" anyway. More fool me!

Anyway, today I stopped with the filling and sanding of the roof, and sprayed it liberally with wood preserver. I still need to do the corner posts too, but I'd already filled them a bit more today, so that will have to wait for another day - and another sanding!

The roof is drying as we speak, but sods law it's not as warm today as it has been for the past few days so it isn't being helped along much at the moment by the Florida weather.

Once it is dry, and the corner posts have received the same treatment, it will be time to apply the primer. This will hopefully provide a long lasting weather proof coating, but only time will tell! I guess that I need at least a couple of decent coats, so this is going to take me through to the middle/end of next week I expect before I can get any more real construction work done. That's the trouble with the oil-based paints - they take that much longer to dry, but I think they're more durable.

EDIT: Wtf? Do I know anything about paint? No I don't! So how do I know that an oil-based one is more durable??? It's all just speculation!