It’s no secret that I’m not the most patient person in the world. With people I tend to be patient—I think I’m pretty good at teaching, for example—although there was that time when I flew into a rage when my brother ate my Snickers and I demanded he go buy me a new one. Sure he was only 8 at the time, but he had a bike.

What was I saying?

Oh, right. But when it comes to projects I’m really excited about, I tend to go at them full-steam ahead steamroller style. In an effort to finish, I often think “Eh, this’ll work,” right before doing something dumb that ends up setting me back.

So we’ve been working on this home office. The desk/table turned out well, and actually so did painting the floors—but you’ll have to wait for photos, though  I know you’re all dying to see the results, right? The next step was repainting a couple of vintage steel file cabinets from my dad’s old job.

These things are five feet tall, and roughly 4,000 pounds apiece. (Helpful hint: when moving heavy stuff yourself, invest in some forearm forklifts. Amazing.) We bought four cans of white spray paint for metal, thinking it would probably take two per cabinet.

In theory, we were right. In practice…not so much. See, we skipped what was apparently a crucial step—we didn’t spray with primer paint first. It turns out, when it comes to spray painting a metal cabinet, the same advice applies that one might give to a virgin bride: Priming is essential and definitely affects the quality of the end product. We used all four cans for one cabinet. It probably didn’t help that we did the 80s hairspray application technique rather than the recommended overlapping-row style. Either way, I give props to graffiti artists.

We bought some primer for the second cabinet, and only had to use a can and a half to get the same even coating as the first.

The moral of the story is, do-it-yourself projects are always a cost savings. But it’s worth it to do them right.

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