Painting without Brush,Ladders and Horses

Those who have seen a house being painted knows how messy a work it is. First the painters put on the work clothes. Use sand paper/emery paper or stone to clean to scratch the surface to a smooth finish. This will bring all sorts of dusts, old cracked or peeled paint on the floor and the room will be filled with smoke.

Next they use two buckets to mix the paint using a stick or by hand. For height they need the ladder or a contraption which in Malayalam is called “Kuthira” (horse). In high rise buildings they put up bamboo poles which are tied to each other in layers horizontally and vertically for doing exterior work. They place a plank at suitable heights to sit or stand and paint.

Once the painters complete  the whole process their pants and shirt will be messed up with paint and if they don’t wear a cap, their heads will also be quite colorful.

Traditional painting is indeed labour intensive activity. If you are painting your home where you are presently living you need to move certain furniture and utensils or cover them up with cloth or paper. Who doesn’t want a less messier, less laborious and more cleaner way of painting?

High tech is in –Now paint without a Brush

When robots have entered medical surgery and house cleaning, it is quite natural that painting industry would also witness the introduction of high tech equipments. It has already happened thanks to Berger which has launched its super-fast, high tech and efficient Express Painting service.

#Sanding Machine: Instead of a sand paper or stone, they use a sanding machine to clean the wall surface. It has got a speed regulator and a vacuum suction bag where all the peeled paint and dirt is deposited. It is fairly long and can be used on walls and celing. For use on corner walls rotating handles round parts can be replaced to enable smooth movement and cleaning.

#Multipurpose Mixer: For mixing paint untouched by hand, they have a speed-variable multi purpose mixer which looks like an enlarged version of a cream mixer  we use to make cake dough. It can be used to mix putty as well as wall paint. All you need is to put the requisite paint or putty in a bucket, pour sufficient water and place the mixer in it and regulate the speed as required.

# Auto Paint Roller: Instead of brush, painters have started using rollers which do not leave behind any marks on the surface unlike brush. Now Berger has introduced the auto roller to make the actual paint job much easier and say good bye to four-inch brush. It has got a body, roller head, extension pipe, inlet pipe for paint and speed control knob. When suction pipe is connected to the paint container, it draws paint when the machine is switched on. It and the roller will be filled with paint and the machine is ready to start its work. The advantage of auto roller is speed, uniform finish and less labour time.

#Jet Washer not the hose: To clean the exterior walls, why not use the express jet washer instead of the normal hose which can put only at a single speed?  It is a versatile machine with high pressure pipes, spray gun, suction pipe and strainer and comes with a higher pressure washer unit. There is a pressure regulator to control water pressure.

#Automatic sprayer: Then there is the automatic sprayer  that gives a uniform finish on water-based and oil based paints on walls.

You no longer need so many brushes of various sizes to paint! All you need is a paint and a surface!

(For details contact Dulux Paints dealer: Katticaran Paints, Palarivattom & Vytilla Ph:9349413517)

The delight of White Wash, theCoir Brush and Tom Sawyers wit!

I remember my childhood days in Trivandrum living in a tiled house with small rooms, wooden cross railings that were painted in blue and walls that were white washed. Painting was not a costly affair in those days but it required some expertise to prepare the white wash- prepared from quicklime. I remember smoke coming out when water is poured over it.

Once they made the mixture, they cleaned the walls spraying water and scrubb it clean with coir pith not the stones or sand paper used now.

There were no brushes with fancy wooden handles and bristles but only brushes made with coir that were used to paint the fences.  It was a delight to see the painters do their job, to reach the top of the building or the room, they used small and big ladders made of bamboo.  It seemed so easy when they deftly moved their coir brushes along the walls. This process was done only once in two or three years and it was nice to see our house after this and it was favored because of its antibacterial properties.


In tiled houses, both interiors and exteriors were white washed, the contrast was given to the building by tiles, doors and windows that used to be painted either blue or with wooden varnish.

I was fond of painting thinking it was an easy job any way! But the problem was I was not good in the strokes so brush marks would be visible on the walls. But with some practice I could do it without anyone else seeing it, except my brother and a few neighbourhood friends.  I was afraid my father wouldn’t like my study time to be occupied with whitewash!

At school, it was fun to learn the English text which had the story of Tom Sawyer who cleverly white washed the walls while he munched the apples and flew the kites his friends gave in return for allowing them  to do the whitewashing.

It required the literary genius of Mark Twain to pen those lines-Tom Sawyer surveyed the fence, 30 yards nine feet high to be white washed. On a cheerful Saturday morning when locusts were in full bloom, there was happiness all round, Tom felt his life was hollow and existence a burden!

But he did it reluctantly and by the time his dreaded friend Ben arrived he was busy moving the brush with gentle strokes. He surveyed the last touch with the eye of an artist.

In my childhood days, enamel paints weren’t that popular – the only colors we could get was black, white and blue. Sometimes, when the painter failed to turn up as promised, my mother would ask me to try my hand at painting the metal gate with two colors black and white. Again preparing the surface was the most difficult thing to do. There should not be any rust or unevenness which had to be smoothened with sand paper. Turpentine or sometimes kerosene was used as a thinner to make it easier to paint.

When our old house was extended and renovated, the paint market had more offerings by way of cement paint (the famous brand was Snowcem) which used to be sold in sacks with choice of colors. It was also better at warding off fungus growth, algae growth in exterior walls and gave a modern look. Enamel paint with different color choices began to be used in wooden doors and windows too.

Distemper and emulsion paint came much later and initially only the rich could afford to distemper their walls. The advantage was that stains or dirt could be wiped away and keeping the surface looking new for a longer time.

Three years ago when we build our home Mercury in Palarivattom in Kochi – the paint industry had seen through many technological changes-  now we have textured walls, exterior paints that can withstand algae and fungus and thousands of shades to choose from the color palette.

As I observed recently in my friend Beena Katticaran’s paint shop -when there is the color drum to mix, any shade is created within a matter of minutes. The paint majors Dulux and Asian Paints are providing complete painting solutions from choosing colors, providing services of specialists painters and textured walls. Now kids rooms have all the cartoon characters, living rooms can have Arabian desert or nature themes to choose from. Tools have also changed, the brush is no longer the symbol but the paint rollers which give a uniform finish to the surface.

Paints have protected our houses and given a character to it whether it was the whitewashed walls of Tom Sawyer era or the emulsified exteriors of today!