Chairman’s Chit Chat April 2025
Why do jobs take far longer to get done than I had anticipated? Take painting the exterior of the garden shed with wood preservative for example, a job undertaken a few weeks ago. An easy enough task you would think, not too physically demanding or taxing for the little grey cells.
In my head I had expected it would take me two hours at the most to paint an 8 foot by 6 foot garden shed.
Of course what I hadn’t taken into consideration or calculated was the time it would take to do all the other things that needed to be done before and after the actual painting. First of all, on the day prior to painting, there was a trip to an out-of-town DIY warehouse to buy the wood preservative.
Once there, it was decisions, decisions.
What colour preservative do I want – green?
brown?
blue?
or
orange?
I opted for green.
How much of it do I need – 9 litres or 12 litres? Not wishing to run out half way through, I went for the 12 litres.
Painting day dawned.
However, I couldn’t start painting until I had cleared the broken panes of greenhouse glass, the rolls of wire and the terracotta pots which were hidden out of sight behind the shed.
Next came scrubbing down the shed with a hard brush to remove all the dust, cobwebs and bird poo.
At last! – the painting commenced and was completed in just shy of my original two-hour maximum. Then the brushes had to be cleaned.
But still the entire job was not done and dusted. The next day, when I was satisfied the paint was fully dry, I had to move the terracotta pots, the rolls of wire and the broken panes of greenhouse glass (why am I keeping them?) back out of sight behind the shed.
My “two-hour” job ended up being spread over three days and I reckon took a total of five hours!!
Tags: paint, shed