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Tiny House Update: Christmas Day Paint Job Destroyed

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Ok, maybe not destroyed, but definitely damaged. Here’s what happened. We saw that it was supposed to be above 35 degrees Fahrenheit for over 24 hours, which is what our exterior paint said it needed to be in order to cure. It also said it would dry in a few hours. All wrong. But we didn’t know that when we set out to paint our tiny house on Christmas day.

As it turned out, it was above 35 for over 24 hours, but it was humid, so the paint was still wet to the touch 16 hours later (the next morning). And then the unthinkable happened. It rained. It wasn’t supposed to rain for another 6 hours! We checked the weather forecast eight times to make sure! But as is often the case with weather predictions, they were wrong. So it rained and we watched gray paint literally run down the side of the tiny house from the kitchen window. And then we yelled and threw things and moped around the house all day and went outside when it stopped raining to hose the grey rainwater off the trailer and the driveway. We sulked and bemoaned our waste of time and materials. It was a far cry from how good we were feeling on Christmas, just a day before, when we spent a few hours with brushes and rollers and our parents and got to stand back and gaze upon a tiny house that finally looked like ours. The tan siding was gone and a beautiful grey stood in its place. I was thrilled. that lime green front door never looked better.

So naturally we felt terrible. My parents had helped, we had all spent several hours Christmas day outside working on it, my dad was sore. And we felt like all their work was for naught. So in addition to feeling like we wasted time and materials, we felt guilty for wasting my parents’ time. But they didn’t complain, so that went a long way toward making us feel less guilty, but not less cranky.

But it’s not all as black as it seems. Only two sides of the tiny house were damaged by the rain since the wind and wet only come from one direction out here. And of those sides, only one will need completely redone, and it’s one of the small sides, so that’s a blessing (though it is one of the lap sides, which are a pain to paint). The other side just needs touched up a bit. Unfortunately, at this point it may have to wait until we get to Texas, cause we’re not holding out for another warm front in January in Ohio. At least we tried. All we can say is we tried.