The Work We Did

April 14 - 28, 2020 Part Two

The manager of MOWI Ocean Falls, Ken, had told us that we would be starting by painting the feed shed.  Jason and I had both pictured a relatively small building, to us, that is what a shed is.  When we saw the area that we would be painting, our mental image could not have been more different.  The feed shed was more like a warehouse, it had garage doors at either end, and it was two stories high and open in the middle with various second-floor areas in each corner.  

Each upstairs corner had an open area up top with a handrail, and there was a wall down below to house other rooms.  The building was made from bare, unfinished plywood, and there were many wires and hoses running along the walls. 

We started by sweeping and wiping all of the wall surfaces to remove accumulated dirt and dust since the building is 17 years old.  We then proceeded to remove as many of the hoses and wire fasteners as possible.  The less we had to do of cutting paint around things, the better.  As it was there was still a lot of cutting to be done.  We had both gotten used to cutting without a taped edge when we did the painting in the apartment above the courthouse, but it was a lot harder doing a nice cut edge over unfinished plywood.  There were so many uneven spots in the plywood that it made it very challenging to get a perfect line.  The paintbrush would skip over indentations thus making it look like the line was not straight. 

We started with a coat of primer and when that was finally done, several days later, we moved on to a coat of topcoat paint.  

We used white for all of the walls and a nice green colour for all of the handrails, ladders, and doorframes.  

We ended up working on this area for nine out of our 11 days, but it sure looked great compared to what it did when we started, and everyone was very happy with it. 

For the other two days of work we did some pressure washing of the large tanks for the fish.  There are walkways that go out from the central building over each line of tanks; there are a total of 24 tanks, four wings of six.  We pressure washed five tanks, including the walkway up above, and all of the many hoses and wire runs.  For each tank we had to set up scaffolding to access the high up areas and then we had to disassemble the scaffolding, pull up each piece one by one onto the walkway, move it along to the next tank, lower it down inside, and reset it up.  

We also had to change out some of the hose runs for oxygen, within each tank.  It was a lot of work, and even though it was pouring rain, it was really nice to be working outside after our nine days of painting inside.