There’s a little dirty secret about painting that no one ever tells you – it ALWAYS takes longer than you think it will.  When I go to paint an entire room, I think it should take about three days for the ceiling, priming, cutting in and two coats of paint rolled on the walls.  But, it generally extends into a forth day for touch ups and maybe a fifth day if I need to go back and caulk ceiling lines or add other finishing touches.  It takes ALL weekend…and most of the next week.

When I have the opportunity, I love to spray a room.  Yes, the prep work is worse, but the overall amount of time you’ll spend working in the room is much less.  I can spray a coat of primer and two coats of paint in a single afternoon.  We have a Graco Magnum X5 sprayer and it does a great job (except for that one time at my friend’s house when the paper that was covering the ceiling fell down while we wall paint was settling and her ceiling ended up turquoise.  Sorry, Kim!).

The big sprayer can be a bit of a pain to pull out for a smaller job, so Graco offered to send me a handheld model – the Graco TrueCoat Plus II – to help me take my take back my weekend.  Obviously, I said yes!  I knew that the Graco brand was a good one, so I was excited to have it in my hot little hands and try it out.

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