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12/02/2005: "Painting the floor"

As I go through receipts to get ready for my fiscal year end, I stumble upon a receipt from December 2004. On the back of this receipt, I had scribbled some notes about my experience painting the floor in our house in Manitoba. I'd like to share those with you now.

• We didn't attempt the project without at least minimal competence. We made sure we had a couple of people with experience painting a floor.
• My wife and I painted as apprentices to her parents, who knew what to do.
• We tried pouring TSP on most of the floor to remove the old paint, then paint, but found out quickly that we weren't using the TSP properly. This resulted in chaos.
• We reset with an incremental plan: we stripped one small section of the floor, let it dry, painted it, then left for the night. This confirmed what we'd learned about stripping the floor with TSP, gave us a quick win and made the rest of the project successful.

Everything I needed to know about painting floors I learned on software projects.