I've been in the shed checking old tins of paint for viability. Most of them were still good. That means I can soon commence the pre-sale renovation of carefully selected parts of the house.

I wore my old painting dustcoat and a headscarf. The effect was unusual.

I was out painting my gas meter box at 8am today. That's the good thing about painting, it doesn't make any noise so you can do it at antisocial hours.

I was going to give it another coat this afternoon but the sun will be on it then, so I might do it first thing tomorrow instead. More on that as I have it.

I finished the gas meter with a quick burst of painting on the Monday morning.

Today I've taken a day off to first-coat the downstairs windowsills.

The first coat is complete

The second coat is complete

My windowsills look great, even if I do say so myself.

The last two Fridays I've been repointing and re-rendering a patch of wall at the back of my house.

I love plastering mortar onto things, it's very satisfying.

The render repair looks quite good.

Meanwhile, inside the house I've got to fill in all the rawlplug holes from where I took the downstairs bookshelves down, and repaint the walls.

I've got to hurry down to B&Q today for paint, in case they aren't considered essential during the shutdown.

I got to B&Q ½ hour after it opened, and there were 40 people queuing outside! In the rain!

But as I'd invested the time to walk there, I joined the queue, and was inside within 13 minutes.

Since I last posted I've filled in all the screw holes, and smoothed them off till you can't feel any difference. That's the best hole filling job I've ever done.

Today I'm set to paint the wall.

I made a bad job of it, it's all uneven

I can't work it out with rollers - half the time it looks perfect, the other half it's a miserable failure.

What seems to be the problem?

Are you letting the paint dry sufficiently before you apply a second coat?

Often, when the paint cover looks patchy and streaky it's because the paint is still wet and translucent and the areas where the roller has naturally overlapped as you move it vertically up and down give it an uneven look.

I suggest you leave it and look at it tomorrow when it's properly dried - then you'll see which areas perhaps need to be gone over again.

I agree. Often, paint looks much better when dried than it did when wet.

I especially find that to be true with blue paint.

You are both right about the 'don't get upset about it till it dries' - that's particularly true with these new-fangled water-based paints they have nowadays.

But, this is a simple case of me doing an even numbered number of strokes instead of odd - so instead of spreading the paint out, I was sweeping most of it back to where I put the roller down, and I've ended up up with vertical streaks. Silver lining, two of the streaks coincided with where the shelf vertical supports had stained the old paint, and they've covered it over most effectively.

Also this was only the first coat so I'd have had to have gone over it again anyway.

I'm wondering, on the second coat, should I try to be clever, and only recoat the gaps between the streaks, or should I just paint the whole wall in the normal way, except properly this time?

Wait until tomorrow when it's dried, woman!

Then paint it again as you did and wait until that's dried sufficiently too.

No trying to be clever jiggery pokery.

Two coats of even a cheaper water-based emulsions will be even and opaque once dried properly.

Right now light is refracting through the damp paint and making it look rubbish, when it's dry the light will reflect properly off the matte surface.