Painting the van was a really fun job and surprisingly fast, considering nearly all the other jobs we had done on the farm so far had taken us far longer than expected…! The hardest part was deciding the colour and then waiting for a calm dry day – in North Wales, this required some mild patience. Alas the day came and painting commenced.
The van – raw
Before painting the van it had to be prepared and cleaned, we already discussed before in another post about filling in holes and sanding them down. Clearly, this is personal preference and down to how much of a tidy finish you want on the van. We are tempered perfectionists so we did do a decent level of preparation. This involved, cleaning the van, then giving it a light sand all over with fine sandpaper (we used a small pad sander that was available and 180 grit sandpaper…seemed to work) then the surface was wiped down for dust. The preparation gives the paint something to key to and will give an even appearance when dry.
After cleaning/sanding the body and masking Arthur, impatiently and not masking the remainder of the van commences rolling
The paint we chose was Rustoleum universal all surface brush paint and we got 6 x 750 ml tins of the stuff, 4 in Canary yellow and 2 in sunset orange, naturally. The paint is a primer and main coat all in one with some rust treatment properties. Wooooo! We decided the body of the van would be yellow and we wanted the top orange, with the back doors also potentially orange. We wanted to give the van 3 coats and have extra left over for any touching up in the future. The paint was pretty cheap in the end, we ordered it online because it was hard to find a supplier locally, and was much cheaper online…! We got 3 mini rollers and a load of gloss rollers because they begin to disintegrate quite quickly when intensive rolling commences.
Rolling strong on the second coat now
Before applying the paint we masked the van with tape and made sure any rust spots were treated with red oxide. After this the fun part began. We rollered the paint on up and down then side to side with tunes playing loudly in the background – essential for a team painting session. We managed to get nearly a whole coat on with one tin, we finished in the dark. We did it all hungover after a party and still enjoyed the whole experience. The next dry day we lightly sanded with wet and dry paper and applied another coat. We are still yet to apply the final coat of glory and do the orange part. But already it looks incredible.
Finishing the second coat with the foreman ensuring quality assurance
The dried van after a couple of weeks the paint has settled wonderfuly
The Living Narratives 