A Two-Meter Roller and the Second Coat of White

Day seventy-one. The house breathed, whitened, and reached upward — all in one day.

The fan in the box. The bath’s humidity — a timber building’s patient enemy — got its answer: a Himpel extractor fan, the serious kind, buried in the ceiling’s carpentry box. The sequence rewarded every earlier decision: the duct to the outside had been pre-run inside the box during carpentry week, so today was cut the opening, pull down the duct, verify the dedicated outlet live with a meter — the check that becomes impossible the moment the fan body disappears into the ceiling — mount, cover, switch on. It pulls hard. The bath’s steam now has an exit.

The second coat. Then the main campaign: second-coat white across the entire interior, living room to annex, light boxes included. First, repair of the repairs — the sanding sessions had chewed the earlier masking, so the rafters and finished zones got re-taped (with Yunhong’s help). The putty-line ghosts that survived coat one vanished under coat two; the walls are finally one color, the unified white that was the whole point.

The ceilings demanded innovation. The bays between rafters can’t be rolled from a ladder without painting the rafters too — so: masking tape on every adjacent timber, then a roller lashed to a two-meter batten, and the ceilings painted standing on the floor, the pole reaching where scaffolding would have been rigged. High-precision edges got the brush from a work platform afterward. The improvised pole roller is crude, effective, and exactly the kind of tool this project keeps teaching us to make instead of buy.

And the courtyard’s turn came. The eave plastering we’ve deferred since April — the courtyard-facing serpent of gaps between rafters — finally started, armed with everything the interior taught us: X18 doctrine, foam pre-fill, immediate tape removal. The house’s last unfinished face is under repair.