Idle Thoughts

One of the jobs I had planned for my April trip was to paint the outside of the house. Traditionally this is a taskthat is done at easter - every year. When I bought the house, it was sporting a nice new coat of paint, but in the couple of years since then the paint had degraded. It had also suffered from the vibrations during the building work which has caused patches of paint to flake off. There are two reasons why houses have to be painted so often. The first is that the sun is much stronger in Spain and this causes paint and most other outdoor materials to degrade quicker than in the UK. The other reason is that the paint used was pretty poor and is only applied on top of the coat from the previous year.

This picture (taken while I was building the patio, in April) shows the state of the wall

Personally I think repainting annually is both unsustainable and unnecessary. Maybe if I was in Spain full-time it would not be such a burden, but decent quality paint and proper preparation should last a lot longer than this - especially as the frontage of the house faces east, so is not subject to the full strength of the sun for any length of time. Since my plans to paint the house in April had been rained off, I decided on an impromptu visit a few weeks later (when everything had dried out) to do the job. I had already measured the house, to estimate the quantity of paint I’d need. The front wall, including around the extension, comes to 40 metres and is 4 metres high. This gives a total area of 160m2 - two coats means I needed enough paint for 320m2.

I flew into Granada with the intention to stop off at AKI, one of the large hardware outlets on a retail park on the outskirts of the city, as this was on my way to the house. However, I had managed to arrive on the day of a religious holiday and all the shops were closed. Since I was only over for a week, this lost day was a significant chunk of my time. Returning the next day, not only did I get the paint I but I found a patio table and set of chairs that I’d been unable to get locally in April.

The type of paint that is traditional on whitewashed spanish houses is ….. whitewash. This is sold dry in sacks and is called Cal which has to be dissolved in water before it is applied. As I mentioned, it is typically just painted over the previous layers. Although it is very cheap and the application is quick, it has a big disadvantage in after it has been painted on, it reacts chemically with the carbon dioxide in the air (and dissolved in the rain) over a period of time to form chalk. As far as I can make out, this is one of the reasons a new coat is slapped on each year - to stop the reaction from causing too much damage to the outer coat by adding a new one.

Now tradition is all very well, but when better products and techniques become available it makes sense to give them a try. In this case I had decided to use modern paints and to strip off all the old stuff, as chalk has absolutely no adhesive qualities for the new paint to stick to. The paint that is used nowadays is called plastico. From what I have seen this is an exterior grade vinyl emulsion, with a high solid content and some UV resistant additives. Although it is available in many colours, white is used in the overwhelming majority of cases. Sometimes there are reasons to stick to tradition.

The repainting was fairly straightforward. In April I had brought a long ladder over,
although it had remained unused on that trip, it was vital now. While the job wasn’t hard, it did take a long time - mainly because of the care needed to scrape off all the old paint. While it generally wasn’t adhered very firmly to the walls, there were places where it simply wouldn’t budge. In all I reckoned I was spending 8 hours in preparation for every one hour spent painting. One practical tip: next time I’ll add a little tint to the first coat of paint, as it’s difficult, when painting the second coat of white on white, to see where you’ve already covered.

This is the paint I used. The selection process was simple: the more solids, the higher the quality, but the higher the price - so buy the most expensive, €50 per tub!

As well as doing the front of the house, the metal railing for the outside steps leading up to the office was looking a bit shabby. I have noticed that locally there is a particular shade of dark green that is used a lot as a secondary colour. So, in keeping with the local custom (and because it looks quite good, too) I decided to go with this for the railings. Again, this was fairly simple, but fiddly work. I needed to strip the railings back to bare metal, apply a primer coat and then the green top coat.

By the end of my trip, I had managed to strip and repaint about half of the frontage: the extension and the cave-house as far as the front door. Most of the rest of the wall does not actually have any house behind it, and had therefore not been affected by the building work so was in better shape. In all I used about one and a half tubs of the four that I bought, so there is enough to complete the job either on the next trip or early next year when the weather is dry enough.

This photo on the right shows the difference between the painted part of the wall (that’s on the right, for those of you who doubt my painting skills) and the state it was in before I started. You can see that the old paint had stained significantly,and also that it was flaking off. The picture also shows that the underlying rendering is not exactly silky smooth, either.

And this is how it ended up

Footnote (March 2008) There is one area where the paint has blistered, but otherwise it's holding up nicely.