Time to paint
Since the skin was finally back on, it was time to paint. I had used Bondo to repair a few small screw holes and one fairly big hole towards the back curbside. I sprayed all these areas with a Rust-Oleum primer. I also sanded the stripes. I did not manage to get all the black spray paint off, I was just smoothing it down.
We pulled her out into the sunshine in the driveway and I then mixed up some TSP and washed the outside well. Use gloves, as TSP is pretty harsh, but it's great for prepping areas to be painted. The box of TSP I bought at Marvin's was like a brick, it felt like it might have been on the shelf for years.
In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm cheap. Or frugal. Or whatever adjective you prefer. I did not want to shell out money for a paint gun, although I knew that would be a lot easier to paint with. Daddy had one hanging up on a nail in the shop, probably been hanging there for 20 years. I get it down, clean it up, and decide to use that.
We decided to start with the light blue stripe, since the over-spray would not matter on areas that were being painted over. After that dried, we taped it off and painted the dark blue stripe.
While kids and the hubby worked on spray painting and taping, I was mixing and testing the paint sprayer. It worked, sorta. It had an intermittent sputter, but I decided it would be fine and just powered through.
Look at that one whitewall tire turned out. Doesn't that just drive you crazy? Since that is one of the last things I'm going to mess with, it will just sit there and annoy me forever, I guess.
I had to bust out the ladder to reach the top, and boy were my calves sore after standing on it all day. You can see my paint sprayer hanging off the edge of the ladder.
Originally, I was going to paint it all white with only the blue stripes, but at the very last second, my daughter and I decided to go with the gray bottom. I figured it would hide some of the defects and dirt better, and also matches my truck. I'm happy with the choice. This is what the first coat looked like, I did 2 coats on all colors.
Close up of the blue stripes. Originally, the stripes were three tones of green. We decided that was too much trouble and went with a more simplistic two color stripe. Can I also just get on the record here and say that nobody else wanted purple stripes? How cute would that have been! We could have called her the purple people-eater.
We had taped off all the windows, although in hindsight, this was not really necessary. There wasn't really much over-spray. It would have been fine to just tape off the metal inside window trim (as I'm leaving it brown) and not bothered with the paper, since it obviously tore with the wind anyway.
This took a weekend from start to finish. The paint gun worked, but if I were going to do it again, I would definitely think about getting a better quality one. This may need revisiting when I start on the inside.