I’m sure you’ve heard this before – the best laid plans of mice and men go awry. Well, it’s true – at least in this case. Monday morning I was optimistic about getting the job finished. I was sure we would pull out of RV Renovators no later than Tuesday, possibly even by the close of business on Monday.

On Sunday, our painter, Steve, told me he had a few small touch-ups to do on Monday, then another clear coat. After that it only needed to be blocked and buffed. Izzy has some sealant to apply and the slide topper needed to be installed.

Around 9am, I realized we might be in trouble. I went outside and saw John sanding the clear coat. I asked him what was up. He said he didn’t think Steve was coming in, he had called in sick. John said he was going to sand then buff the clear coat. I told him that’s not what Steve intended. I showed him a few areas that Steve wanted to touch up. I also told him Steve only applied a light clear coat to seal the paint before it rained and he was going to clear coat it again.

Here’s an example of the small imperfections Steve wanted to touch up

John said he would handle it. He cut through the clear coat and masked and painted several areas. He was still working on it when I left around 3pm to go to Viewpoint RV Resort to choose our site and also inform them that I may not be out of the repair shop on Tuesday.

From there, I stopped at Red, White and Brew and had a cold one with my friends Pat and Leendert.  When I got back to the coach a little past 5pm, John was gone. He had sprayed clear coat and at first I thought he was done. Then I looked closer and felt sick to my stomach. The paint didn’t have small touch ups – it had major flaws now. John had screwed it up completely.

Bad tape job

More bad masking

Waves sanded into the trim

Tuesday morning I had a heated conversation with the owner, Monte. I was totally frustrated. All the hard work done by Izzy, Armando and Steve had gone by the wayside. In the end, people won’t see the time and talent that went into the job – they will only judge the job by the finish applied. I’m sure it was disappointing for Steve, too. He had to sand out the mistakes and start taping all over again.

Masking and re-shooting the base coat

He spent about five hours taping and applying colors again.

More taping

Around 3pm he was ready to apply clear coat. He rescued the paint job, but it has a few minor flaws that weren’t there on Sunday.

Clear coat applied

Oh well, the rest of paint on the coach isn’t perfect either. I’m not going to lose any sleep over it at this point. I’m hoping there are no more glitches today and we can get out of here.

We’re looking forward to moving into an actual RV Resort with a patio outside our door, pickleball courts and swimming pools. I’ll have our trailer and can set up the barbeque and Traeger smoker/grill. The weather looks good for the rest of the week – highs in the mid 70s and sunny. They’re calling for rain in the area over the weekend though.

While I was watching Steve mask an area he had painted in preparation for the next color, one of the service guys stopped by. He mentioned how labor intensive repainting a coach is. I agreed with him. He told me he often gets requests from customers to do a “spot repair” on peeling clear coat. Then when he explains what’s needed to repair it right, they’re shocked at the cost.

Clear coat on a two-stage paint system contains UV inhibitors to prevent the base (color) coat from deteriorating due to exposure to sun light. Peeling clear coat can be a indication of the base coat deteriorating. You can’t just shoot clear coat over the area and call it good.

As Steve was masking, I realized I was wrong about the number of colors in our paint scheme. Earlier I said it was four colors but it’s actually five colors. I wasn’t counting the base layer that makes the 1/4″ stripe between the other colors. So what I was calling the first color was really the second color.

Second color masked and Steve is spraying the next color

The blue areas you see in the photos are painter’s tape masking the previous coat of paint. We don’t have any blue paint.

After each color, Steve masked the freshly painted area, then sanded the overspray with 800 grit sand paper and Scotch-Brite pads and wiped everything clean with solvent.

Third color on and masked

The fourth color covered large areas and is masked with paper

All five colors revealed

Now the end is in sight. Steve will touch up a few spots, lightly sand the surface and apply clear coat. Once the clear is cured, it will be wet-sanded in stages with with fine grit, then buffed for a final polish.

With the weekend upon us, we’ll have a few more days here at RV Renovators before we’re done.

Donna made it home from her trip to Vieques around 9:30pm Friday night. It was a long day of travel. She had a great time there and she’s feeling refreshed after spending a week in the sun and sand – although she may have caught some kind of cold virus on her flight there. Hours of flying in a crowded airplane can spread a lot of germs. She still has a rough throat, but nothing too debilitating.

We’re expecting the temperature to reach nearly 80 degrees today and tomorrow with a chance of rain moving in Sunday night. I don’t know if rain will affect the final steps of finishing the coach. I hope not.

Thursday morning Steve sprayed the first base coat of paint. He started by spraying a fine, misty tack coat. This fine spray isn’t meant to cover the panel, it just puts down a very light coat that sticks and creates a tacky surface for the next pass to adhere to.

Steve spraying over the tack coat

Once he had this first color applied, he carefully inspected the surface. He found two flaws – tiny chips in the gelcoat that I doubt I would have even seen if he hadn’t pointed them out. He filled these spots with polyester resin. Once it set, he sanded the areas smooth and painted them again.

Filling a flaw

First color applied

This first color coat provides a base that seals the entire surface. The thing is, this color is only needed for the 1/4″ stripes that separate the other colors in the final design. Once the design is taped with 1/4″ tape, this coat will be painted over in the other three colors used. When all of the colors are done, the 1/4″ tape will be pulled off, revealing the stripes.

Taping the design on the slide out wall is a long, tedious process. At the factory, they use templates to outline the design and can mask the design quickly. Steve had to re-create the design free-hand. He did this by looking at the original panel that was removed from the wall and matching the existing points where the slide out meets the rest of the body. With the slide pulled in, all of the lines and colors need to match up.

Taping the design

There’s no way I could have done this. It takes patience, attention to detail and downright obsession with perfection. Steve made several attempts with each tape stripe before he was satisfied. He would lay out a line, then see a tiny squiggle or an arc that he didn’t like and he would pull the tape up and start over. Once he had it down to a point where it looked good to me, he would continue to adjust the tape line until he felt it was perfect.

Around 4pm I left. I rode the Spyder to Mike Hall’s place and retrieved some supplies from the trailer. Then I went to Lucky Lou’s where I had a couple of cold ones with Mike and Jodi Hall.

When I returned to RV Renovators, they were done working for the day. Steve had started spraying another color. Once the areas of this color are painted, he’ll mask over the color up to the 1/4″ tape lines. Then he can do the same process with the next color. When the last color is applied and cured, all the masked areas will be uncovered and we’ll see the result.

More color

Then it will only be a matter of applying the clear coat, wet sanding and buffing to the final gloss.

Donna is traveling back home today. Her week in Vieques went all to quickly for her – although I’m looking forward to her return. I’m sure she’ll have lots of stories to tell me. She won’t arrive here until 9pm or later.

We’re expecting the temperature today to match yesterday’s high of 84 degrees. The weekend should be a little cooler, but the rain they were predicting has disappeared from the forecast.

Achieving good results from a paint job requires meticulous preparation. This is especially true when the panel you’re painting is flat and more than a 100 square feet of area. When the finish is applied, the smallest preparation flaws will show.

More sanding with guide coat

After another morning of sanding, I moved the coach after lunch on Tuesday. I drove it to the dump station first – it had been only eight days but I thought I should dump the tanks since I was moving.

I set up the coach next to the paint booth. The painter, Steve had previously worked at a custom car shop. He excels at applying multi-colored paint schemes and is very picky about the surface preparation. He filled the corners of the edge moldings. Then he decided to use polyester resin to fill the entire joints where the edge moldings meets the sidewall. He told me there were small gaps in places and when the finish is applied the small gaps will show. They’re sealed underneath so no moisture would get through, but the paint wouldn’t look smooth over the gaps.

Polyester resin on the corner

Moldings filled with polyester resin and primed

This took more time to sand the resin and create a crisp edge along the moldings.

New site next to the paint booth

I looked at a couple of coaches that Steve recently painted. One, a Sportcoach, had been repaired and painted on the entire rear cap and some of the rear quarter. The areas Steve painted looked better than the factory paint. The areas where the color scheme changed color had slight ridge lines in the factory paint that I could feel with my fingers. The newly painted sections were totally smooth. The other coach was a Winnebago Tour and the factory paint had a slight orange peel look in places. The areas Steve painted were smooth as glass.

I have high expectations for the final finish on our new living room slide skin. Wednesday morning went by with more sanding and surface cleaning. The cleaning and degreasing took a lot of time. In the afternoon Steve started masking but was pulled off the job to handle an emergency repair that took about an hour. When he returned, Armando came with him to help.

They applied masking tape to the backside of the moldings which extended sticky side up about an inch beyond the edge of the molding. Then I pulled the living room slide in. The slide will stay in until the paint work is done. It’s a good thing to have a floor plan that’s usable with the slide in. The masking tape along the edge of the molding gave them a way to mask right up to the edge without overlapping any of the molding.

They used paper over the windows and around the slide. They also put paper on the roof, A/C covers and satellite dome. The front and rear of the coach were covered with plastic sheets.

Masked and ready for paint

The last thing Steve did was checking the color match of the Diamant paint. Meanwhile another worker started stripping the front lower panel. I’m having that refinished while were at it. It had large stone chips that were beginning to peel in areas.

Today we’ll finally start getting painted. The forecast looks good – we should reach 80 degrees today and tomorrow with zero percent chance of rain. Rain is likely to come over the weekend.

No work was performed on the coach over the weekend. I discovered more work was done Friday afternoon than I reported in my last post. One of the basement doors was damaged, presumably by the one of the hoofs of the deer that slammed into the side of the coach.

I didn’t notice it right away as it’s partially hidden with the living room slide deployed, but they fixed the ding and it’s ready for paint.

Ding in basement door fixed

I spent most of Saturday morning reading. At noon I rode the Spyder down to Jason’s Deli on Baseline Road a few miles from here. I had one of my favorite sandwiches for lunch – the muffuletta made with ham, salami, provolone and olive spread.

After lunch I visited Howard Graff at his place. I hung out and fondled his gun collection. We’ll have to hit the gun range one of these days. Other than that, I didn’t do much on Saturday. With Donna away I just hung out with Ozark the cat and read a book.

Sunday morning I rode the Spyder down Main Street to the Quick Trip. Quick Trip is a privately held company with headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They have stores in eleven states which are gas stations with convenience stores. The also prepare food to go on site. I wanted to try their breakfast pizza that our friend Joel Myaer told us about.

The breakfast pizza is a thin pizza crust topped with sausage gravy, scrambled eggs, sausage bits, bacon bits and cheese. It was good but a personal size pizza was enough for two meals. With Donna away I’m not following a very healthy diet.

I planned to go to a Superbowl party at Mike and Kim Childs house. Around noon I thought I should try our satellite and see if it was possible get reception. I hadn’t even tried it because I was sure we would still be blocked by the building next to us and the canopy over our roof. To my amazement, it found the signal and I had reception. I went online and opened a chat with Dish Network support and changed my location from San Diego to Mesa and got local Phoenix broadcasts.

With that done, I tuned in the Superbowl pregame show. I decided to pass on the Superbowl party. I knew I would want to have a few beers during the game and I also tend to get a little animated at times during football games. If I went to the party I would have taken an Uber ride – it’s over 10 miles each way and I wouldn’t want to be on the road on the Spyder after the game. I thought it was best if I just hung out in the coach where I could yell at the TV without making a fool of myself.

The first half looked like an Atlanta blow out. The second half was an epic comeback by New England and the game went to overtime. What an entertaining Superbowl.

The weather was nice all weekend with the temperature reaching the upper-70s. Donna sent me a photo of sunset behind the band at an outdoor bar in Vieques. I think she’s enjoying the warmer weather and better scenery there.

Sunset behind the band

Today we have high, thin clouds and the temperature should reach the 70s again. Izzy and Armando are finishing up the edge trim. They need to seal all of the trim, then block sand a few areas before they put the windows in. I think Steve will start painting tomorrow.