I’ve been feeling awfully lazy during the past couple of months. Trashy novels and summer and fall TV are partly to blame, but lately it also seems like the minutiae of life are expanding to fit my available free time, and I just can’t get around to half the projects bubbling away on my back burner.
However, the arrival of lovely, lovely fall has me thinking about using my garage for more than storage. I’ve got dining-room chairs that need to be repainted and recovered. I’ve got a $5 Craigslisted laminate wine cabinet that will eventually coordinate with the dining-room chairs. I’ve got a woefully under-landscaped yard and an appalling lack of fresh herbs growing in my nonexistent garden. (And yes, I know it’s fall. By the time I’m ready to grow the garden, it’ll be spring.) Yes, friends, it’s list-making season. But not only that: it’s list-item-crossing-off season.
To that end, I’ve spent a few days prepping for something that’s been on my list for months: painting the master bathroom, which has has been put off. And put off. Until now.
My plans for the space are a topic for another day (mostly because said plans are still pretty fuzzy), so I’m just going to sing the praises of my new best friend: the Black & Decker Mouse sander.
As any seasoned home improver knows, painting is 90% preparation and 10% satisfaction (okay, 5% satisfaction and 5% accidentally getting paint on the ceiling and swearing). Unless you like the look of cracks and bumps in your freshly painted walls, you’ve got to get friendly with the spackle and sandpaper before you whip out the roller. Being in a rather moist area, our bathroom walls started out in rougher shape than those in the rest of the house, so we’ve done some relatively extensive drywall patching… which necessitates relatively extensive sanding. With a plethora of refinishing projects on the horizon and an increasing tendency to procrastinate less-than-fun jobs, I decided that buying a sander was the best way to git-r-dun.
And git-r-dun I have (at least to the level of doneness appropriate for a room that no one besides Sean and I will ever see). I’m used to gutting it out with the sanding block, so it was a little shocking to turn on the Mouse and watch a roughly plastered spot that would have taken five or ten minutes by hand magically turn silky-smooth in about eight seconds.
As its name suggests, the Mouse is teensy, so it’s not for heavy-duty projects or large areas. However, the price ($39.99) is right, and it comes with a few detailing attachments that make it versatile enough for most small homeowner-y jobs. It has a dust collection attachment that works quite well, too. Of course, it does require specialized sanding pads, and for some reason my Home Depot stocks only extra-fine and extra-coarse grits—but that’s what the interwebs are for. In a pinch, it’s easy to use standard sandpaper:
- Take a worn Mouse pad and trace its shape (including the location of the holes) on the back of a sheet of sandpaper in your desired grit.
- Cut out the sandpaper. Poke holes with pen or screwdriver.
- Secure to worn pad with little nibbets of duct or double-sided tape.
- Sand.
- Laugh at The Man and His attempts to fence you in with proprietary power tool accessories.
This hack makes for less even sanding and the sandpaper wears out fairly quickly, but it works.
