My entire back and shoulders are spasming when I go walking.

I decided that regardless of the cost I would need to buy an airless spray gun as I still have some very large areas to paint in the future.

Linda convinced me to buy a top quality professional unit. The cost was staggering.

I bought it from Solver in Midland and their support has been very good - expecially when I had some teething problems with it on Saturday (due entirely to my inexperience).

On Saturday I spent an hour rubbing back the machined part of each plank with fine sandpaper.

Part of the face tends to have some rough fibre that captures dust very quickly.

The trick is to rub this back lightly between coats.

After this I used a petrol blower to clean down the deck area so that contaminants would not blow on to the paint work when spraying.

Next I spent about an hour masking off the window frame and door frame so that I could keep the water based paint off the oil based enamel if there was any overspray.

Now I was nervous about using the new machine.

I read the instruction manual several times and followed the instructions for purging any storage fluids and then priming the machine with paint.

Initially I had trouble because the spray pattern was a horizontal blob and I was also traversing the wall in a horizontal direction. I was ending up with drips, runs and sags.

After calling Solver for advice, I realised that I should be traversing the wall in an up and down direction. Once I did this, I had the whole wall painted in 10 minutes.

At first I thought that the paint stream was so fine that the coating would be too thin. However, when I looked at my 10 litre bucket of paint I realised that I had used up the same amount of paint as when I did the first coat.

The cleanup process took me an hour and a half due to inexperience. At one stage I ended up covered from head to foot with diluted paint due to a mistake.

I think that next time I can get the cleanup process down to half an hour.

Also, because I know that the next major area of wall will not be painted for at least three months, I "winterised" the machine by priming it with anti corrosive.