WORKSHOP NOTES
Workshop notes
Short observations from the bench that do not need a whole guide.
These are the things that come up on the bench often enough to be worth writing down, and not often enough to justify a guide of their own. Most of them are about judgement rather than technique: when to look at a surface, when to stop working it, and what the eye is actually comparing.
A second coat looks worse before it looks better
Wet paint over dry paint reads as patchy for as long as it takes the new coat to level and dry. Judging a wall halfway through a second coat is how a perfectly good wall ends up with a third.
The only useful time to judge a coat is when it is dry and the light is raking across it from one side. Everything before that is guesswork with a roller in your hand.
How to stop a tile row drifting
A row of tiles fixed onto soft adhesive creeps downhill under its own weight, a millimetre at a time, and nobody notices until the far end.
A timber batten fixed on the line and left in place until the adhesive has set removes the problem entirely. Check the level along the top of every second or third tile as you go, and correct immediately.
What a spirit level cannot tell you about an old wall
A level tells you the truth about gravity. It tells you nothing about whether the result will look right next to a skirting that slopes, a ceiling that dips or a window that was never square.
In an old room the eye compares a new line with the nearest existing one. Sometimes the honest answer is to split the difference deliberately rather than to be perfectly level and visibly wrong.
The order to sand in
Coarse, medium, fine, in that sequence and without skipping. Each grade exists to remove the scratches left by the one before it.
Jumping straight to a fine grade on proud filler takes forever and loads the abrasive. Stopping at a coarse grade leaves scratches that the paint will magnify rather than hide.
The guides these notes come out of are indexed on the room directory.