Oh Yeah ... How Did Painting With An Old Brush Turn Out?

Um, OK, or at least good enough that I didn't switch to a new paintbrush like I could've.

I was in a rush to finish re-painting the fence on the sides of our house red, but I took two days off after spending the weekend two weekends ago trying to bang out that project.  I wasn't done -- I had the outside and the front of the right fence to do -- but I had to go to "work" and do some other stuff, so I couldn't finish the job till later in the week (which was last week).

I hate it when the paint on a brush dries.  I tried using them before to no avail; they're all crusty and can't pick up any paint.  I went to the hardware store to find solvents that could strip the brushes of the paint, but they're considered hazardous materials and therefore have to be disposed of properly, and I didn't want to deal with that, so instead I just buy more brushes.  I think there are about six or seven of them in a bag in the shed.

When I resumed painting, I noticed that when I spackled it on the fence that paint wouldn't go on evenly across the paint.  By that I mean that I saw these black lines in the same direction as I painted; the width and color of these streaks match the bristles of the brush.  I don't know if that meant that the bristles were so dry that no paint was being transferred from the brush to the fence and that the only paint on the fence was carried between the bristles or what; it was something I noticed.

Maybe I thought that same phenomenon happened when I used the brush for the first time, or maybe I was just too lazy to care.  But the paint worked well enough that I stuck with it.  A part of me still looks at the fence and thinks there's a distinct difference between the look of the part of the fence that was painted with the virgin brush and the part painted with the used-up one.

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Oh, by the way, I didn't know how long the job was going to take, but I wanted to finish re-painting the fence that day (Friday) while not having any paint left over.  And I don't know how, but not only did I complete the whole thing in about three hours, I had just enough paint to re-paint the whole thing, no more, no less.  I had a feeling of accomplishment.