Let's Paint!

[Thorondor]

Talk about buffeting winds. Not exactly the kind of Christmas eve one would want, that's for sure.

A shame as, had things been patched up in time, it would've at least saved you the need for the interior "de-icing" action.

And think not I've forgotten ye, yous no good seagulls; ye be askin' for buckshot ye are! *waves fist in the air*

All told, nothing that some sheer Zombie muscle can't handle as it turns out once again.

[Zombie]

I spent some more time on the center posts in the greenhouse and the two on either side of the doors. The posts on either side of the door on the West side were both out of whack. Part of the problem was the short pieces of metal strapping I previously used. And the piece of slippery roof membrane under the strapping wasn't making a good connection to the metal tubing. I scavenged a longer piece from inside the greenhouse which wasn't necessary due to another fix job and used that. In order to get a better connection between the metal tube and the strapping I used a piece of rubber roofing instead. And last but not least, let's get rid of those hot dipped galvanized screws and step up to fully coated deck screws:

As an aside, I found that the two pieces of strapping were from the same piece. Anyhow, this is what the final setup looked like:

This should be much better now. Another issue was that the posts were not connected to the ground so they ended up "floating" around due to wind loads or being bumped or even opening the door roughly. This needs to be fixed so I found the old brackets (which I painted previously) and then got a couple blue anchor bolts from the hardware store (3 1/2 inches long if I remember correctly and they were expensive as hell). Pilot holes needed to be drilled into the blacktop so I did that then carefully tightened the bolts until they were tight but not too tight because that could cause the blacktop to crumble. Coated deck screws were used to affix the thing to the structure:

Seems solid again. At some point in the near future (like this summer) I'll put in the third anchor bolt (didn't get these yet as I didn't want the sticker shock to upset bossman). The East side of the greenhouse has the brackets but only one anchor bolt in each one so this will need to be addressed at the same time. Plus the brackets are rusty and need a good coat of primer and paint. After they are installed I'll paint on a coat of black rustoleum enamel on all of them to protect the brackets, anchors and screws from the ravages of mother nature.

One of the last things I did was to put screws into the wooden slats which will be used to affix the plastic to the greenhouse. Not all the way mind you - just enough so the end pokes out a little bit. Quite a few slats so this took the better part of the afternoon:

I'm reusing some of the older slats since they were still okay, and the vertical slats will be reused too. On the far right is the "discard pile" - those are the slats that were rotten, warped, moldy or all 3. Not all of them are junk though.

I think next post will be putting on the new plastic, so I wouldn't go anywhere yet. Stay tuned for that!

- Zombie

[Thorondor]

15 hours ago, Zombie said:

And last but not least, let's get rid of those hot dipped galvanized screws and step up to fully coated deck screws

You sure know how to talk dirty when you really want to, mister; bring it on!

Kidding aside, the strapping of the posts does look far more convincingly secured this way.

With the quality of the material being employed it's not that surprising that expense would increase accordingly. And it's not like you aren't reusing a number of things already, which further evens things out.

Wooden slats prepped and ready to go. Time to flash some plastic!

[Zombie]

I was watching the weather reports closely for the last couple weeks to see if there would be a semi-decent day to put up the greenhouse plastic and I finally decided to try it on Wednesday. It was an early start and in hindsight it should have been even earlier as the wind was starting to pick up. At one point I almost backed out of it as the wind was getting borderline bad, but then the next minute it would be almost still.

On Tuesday I cut the greenhouse plastic to size as it comes in a double-sized roll. So it was nice that was already done. Then I had to unfold it, attach the pull ropes, get out the ladders, extension cord, drill, extra screws, etc. Step one is starting to pull the plastic up the side carefully without it getting snagged on anything or ripped:

As always, it's: pull a little bit, tie off the twine, go to the next, pull a little bit, tie it off etc. (The piece of black Gorilla tape on the ground was from the other day when I cut the plastic to size). If I had 2 or 3 more people to help it would go a lot faster as they could do the pulling while I orchestrate the show. But there's a very short list of people I'd fully trust to do the pulling without requiring constant supervision. No worries, I can do it myself but it just takes longer. Here it is all pulled over:

All told it was about a half an hour to get it to this point so it didn't take that much time. And then there was some time spent trying to get the amount of drape on each of the sides with the doors even. This wasn't easy as every time I'd get it just right the wind would pick up and pull it the other way. That's exasperating. I finally got one board installed above one of the doors, then enlisted the help of a colleague to pull the plastic down on the other side while I put on the slat above him. And that was the trick: getting the reveal locked in. And although it wasn't perfect it was workable.

I had to do some other stuff around the shop for a couple hours, and then take a couple phone calls from suppliers and before I knew it lunchtime. After lunch I continued by taking off the twine. Then it was the arduous task of figuring out how to get the plastic to fit the short sides. The trouble is, the plastic is actually short by a couple feet as you can see from the above pic. So we have to fold the extra plastic from the long side over. This wasn't working out very good. I decided the better course of action was to install a piece of plastic on either side of the doors so I didn't have to be exact on the folding aspect. That was another good trick I learned from this.

A little bit later I got some much needed help from bossmans 15 year old son after he got out of school for the day. We put up all the slats on the short sides to get the plastic taut, then did the top part of the long sides. And that's where we ended off:

I probably could have toughed it out and tried to finish but at this point I needed a rest and a bite to eat. I'll continue another day. We put some concrete blocks on the sides to keep the wind from whipping the plastic around too much. Here's a pic from the inside looking west:

On the right side of the door I extended the plastic by putting another longer piece that went to the first 2x4 on the North side:

So that's why it may look a little more opaque than the rest. I think this was a good idea anyway as this is the worst side as it is the most exposed and it faces the two directions with the worst winds during the winter. I didn't take a pic of this, but I'm almost positive this plastic is not as opaque as the previous stuff. We could actually see the outline of the sun in orange through the plastic.

The saga will continue tomorrow though as we have to get this buttoned up before any bad weather moves in.

- Zombie

[Thorondor]

Even just reading about the initial process of setting the plastic tentatively in its place caused me to feel a little trepidation. It further goes without saying that it's no joke having to deal with any sort of fickle winds in a situation like that.

To spell it out, with such a big span of plastic it better be held down properly or things may get undesireably airborne without much warning.

Your experience handling the task kept the whole thing manageable and, unquestionably, later having a helping hand made all the difference. No matter how trusting in your ability others at the place can be though, I can't imagine being around when you started and not volunteering to help make the job at hand more easily approachable at the very least.

Having as many slats placed as you did by the end of the day, it can be said a modicum of peace of mind can be had.

Eyeing that pic from the inside looking west I am liking the looks of it. Let's see how well you can wrap it all up.

[Zombie]

I didn't have a lot of time to work on the greenhouse yesterday as I was busy cutting flowers among other things. It was quite windy out and the plastic was slapping around pretty good so I had to go out there and start putting on the vertical slats on the long sides:

That did the trick as did putting some more bricks and blocks on the excess to prevent that from flapping around. I took a pic of the eastern-most center post to show what my new repairs looked like:

I cut two slots in the post then chipped out the stuff in between with a screwdriver (don't have a chisel). To smooth that out I found out my rasp just barely fit so I used that, then stuck in the new coated deck screws. I also addressed the the hanging basket poles. They were just sitting loose on the hooks from the hoops and if there were too many baskets on one side it would cause the pole to jump up off the hook and into the greenhouse top. That wasn't fun to repair. To prevent that from happening (and as an interim fix) I used two UV protected zip ties to affix the pole to the hook:

And here's what the full length looks like (facing east):

Today it was all systems go on the greenhouse again. I put on the lower slats on the long sides first. There was a couple issues where there was a big space between the skirt boards which I somehow didn't catch during my repair walks. Some of those will have to wait till the next time we replace the plastic again. I figured I could still fix one corner since the plastic wasn't affixed there yet. Found a cutoff of the new skirt board from the last time and it was the perfect size. I had to cut a piece of decent grade 2x4 lumber to fit the space:

And here's what it looks like installed along with the new piece of skirt board:

I made a boo-boo with the skirt board as I drilled the holes too low so I had to pull the screws back out and put them up a little higher:

After that it's time to affix the plastic to the new skirt piece with a pre-loved piece of slat from the last time:

I then cut off all the excess plastic from each of the long sides and worked on getting the east side buttoned down:

Respectable again. I still have to attach the plastic on each side of the door to the frame yet but other than that I have 3 sides complete. The west side still needs to be worked on sometime so I'll keep you updated on that.

- Zombie

[Thorondor]

Battening down the hatches, as it were. And just in the nick of time as you took care of other daily work.

Some people call it makeshift solutions, others call it practicality. Both your workarounds on the center pole and the hanging basket poles make sense and outright just work. It all boils down to making things fit and you've puzzled through it all with what you had at hand.

Look at that trim - this ship will sail! Without getting off the ground.

[Space Voyager]

I see no mention of the crew that helped you... Was this a one man job?! 

The result is worth all the praise, no matter how many people participated, but if you did it all alone, it is a borderline miracle. With the size of the thing, I wouldn't even bother on my own.

[Zombie]

At the start it was just me, but I got help from bossman's son in the afternoon.

Not a miracle, as I've maybe said before this isn't the first time I've ever put it up. When I first started work I'd help with replacing the top but as time went on I kinda became "the guy" to get it done. And helpers started to disappear as they moved on to other jobs so now it's mostly just me. I get by doing it alone assuming it's not too windy out but having a helper makes it go quicker. There's only so much prep I can do beforehand.

- Zombie

[Zombie]

Here's a quick update, I managed to get out there and finish off the west side of the greenhouse today as the bottom part was still loose. There was quite a bit of extra plastic from the sides which I intentionally didn't cut off as I didn't know how much I'd need for the west. So I wrapped that around the west side as best as I could and then put on the slats. When I was happy with it is when I cut off any excess from the bottom (I leave a few inches as it keeps water from getting behind to the skirt board). I also got the plastic around the door attached:

Those 3-tiered fiberglass units go against the plastic so you don't really see much of the side when they are there. I had to put a double row of slats on the upper part due to all that excess plastic but I'd much rather have an excess to create another layer of protection. On the close side of the pic (which faces north west) there are probably like 4-5 layers in some spots. On the south west it's more like 3-4 layers.

I also messed around with the east side today. I put the slats along the sides of the door which finished that off. I also took the old rusty drywall screws off the spacer around the frame and put coated deck screws in there instead. Looks good now:

I filled up about 55 big pails with water and flower preservative as tomorrow we are starting to get flowers in for Mother's Day - oh how time flies! I'm hoping to get that knocked out in a hurry as I need to clean out the small garage for next week when we'll be using that for deliveries. I'd also like to touch up some of the red tables in the greenhouse as there are some flaps of loose paint from water getting on it and freezing and thawing during the last few months. My work never ends this time of the year!

- Zombie

[Thorondor]

Not that it was ever in question, Zombie, but you seem to have "nailed" it all down very competently from what I can see.

The plastic is not entirely uniformly stretched, which is understandable given the structure itself and some inevitable folding, yet it's definitely not going anywhere unless some major force of nature manifests itself around those parts.

Mothers are, of course, very much in that category so you better make sure any storming that happens on their account is well taken care of too in the near future.

[Zombie]

On 5/3/2023 at 7:33 PM, Zombie said:

 I'd also like to touch up some of the red tables in the greenhouse as there are some flaps of loose paint from water getting on it and freezing and thawing during the last few months.

Step one in a project like this is scraping the loose flaps off. And a lot of times once you start you'll keep enlarging the area. It's amazing how it looks fine from the surface but underneath it's a different story. Here are the tables after scraping, sanding and a primer coat:

I still have plenty of that red mistinted latex paint so after caulking I applied a coat of that on top:

Here the color difference is pretty apparent, but let me tell you that when the sun is out it's really hard to tell the difference. With the new plastic on the roof the greenhouse heats up nicely so that red latex dried fast. Time to touch up the red latex with the red polyurethane then:

Yeah, the new areas are shinier than the rest but that'll dull off as time goes on. Honestly, it wasn't as bad as I initially thought it was going to be. It's mostly holding up fairly decently. If the cover didn't come down and leave the paint exposed to the elements in winter it probably would have been fine. The next project is going to be taking out the boards that go on top of the tables to see how they fared (you can probably see them stacked under the table on the picture above).

I managed to get all the flowers cut the other day, took longer than I hoped but at least the first batch is in water:

I worked on cleaning out the small garage the other day too. It's about halfway done I estimate. There are some more leaks in the roof so I'll have to see about getting up there and patching that before Mother's Day. Pretty soon an electrician is coming over to change out all the fluorescent tubes in the store and in the "middle room" where I work to LED's so it'll be nice to finally have some bright light to show how old I am and how cruddy stuff looks.

- Zombie

[Thorondor]

Do you know where the rubber meets the road? The same place the latex comes together with the polyurethane! *ducks*

Now for some trivia time: Did you know that in nature latex is found as a milky fluid in 10% of all flowering plants?

I'd venture most likely you did, of course.

But, yeah, that touch up does the trick. I like the outcome well enough.

Good to hear things are steadily chugging along well in anticipation of the big day. May all your true colours shine this Sunday!

[Zombie]

Here's round #2 on flower cutting from Sun May 7. There were 6 bunches of waxflower which came in with almost all the blooms falling off. I shook all of the bunches to get the loose stuff off to check if they could still be used. Nope, too far gone:

It's hard to see but the layer is almost 2 cm deep. Needless to say, these were swapped out for a different color which wasn't shedding blooms. In the next pic you can see the decent waxflower which is in back of the yellow lilies:

And of course, what's a cutting session without showing the full garbage barrel and all the pretty flowers:

We ended up with the perfect amount of daisies, roses and carnations after all was said and done. Don't ever recall that happening before, but like I said before I cut the amount of flowers down by 5-10% in some areas this year which gave me a little wiggle room to get some flowers in from different suppliers (for cheaper) if we really needed it.

In terms of deliveries, on Friday we had our "usual" squad of drivers while I was the coordinator of the thing. I did sneak a few Saturday nursing home deliveries on the loads on Friday just to take the heat off us (maybe 5-10 total deliveries or so). On Saturday I came in early to get out a big funeral of 17 pieces, then when I got back I took the 3 lone church orders out at 7:15 am. Probably should have came in even earlier but it all worked out:

And let me tell you this: I would have killed for any of the loads I sent out on Saturday. They were all perfect in terms of location to each other. And it was amazing that as the new deliveries were being made I was able to sneak them in on a current run or a later one and they were in the same location as the rest of the load. It was unreal how that happened. Nothing really to do with my skills (well, a little) it was mostly dumb luck.

As usual there were a few times on Saturday where multiple drivers returned at the same time to create havoc. It didn't really faze me much as I had loads ready to go for almost everyone at all times. I tried to keep the number of deliveries under 10 per load too and for the most part that happened except for two 10 delivery loads (those couldn't be helped, it all had to go due to scheduling).

And same deal as always, I boxed up all the deliveries and put them on our big rolling wooden cart to haul them to the vehicles - that saves my back and it's safer as you don't run the risk of dropping anything. That's probably one of the better improvements I started doing. Anyhow, I could see the end was in sight at around 11 am and by 2 pm I was already in cleanup mode putting stuff away. Here's what the garage looked like at 3:45pm:

I think I was home before 5 as well after cleaning up the mess inside. All in all it was a good end to the holiday.

In terms of painting (and I don't remember if I posted this before so cut me some slack if I did), back in mid-April I addressed the door threshold yet again. The polyurethane had come off during the winter for some reason, probably didn't let the concrete cure enough last year, too thin of a coat, and salt + freezing/thawing cycles. Plus I wasn't really happy with a couple areas which I filled in with caulk. I scraped the whole thing, dug out the caulk and put some concrete in there instead:

The other day I finally decided it was time to get some primer on it again:

It's going to need to be caulked again and this time I'm putting 3 coats of polyurethane on. So hopefully that will close out this endless job for the foreseeable future. After that, who knows. I have a bunch of things on my internal "to-do" list so whenever I have the time I'll probably start work on those.

- Zombie

[Thorondor]

Shake your money maker - but not too hard. That's one heck of a fallout!

Maybe a lot was left on the cutting room's floor at some point, but the results are very pleasing to the eye. The bouquets do not disappoint and everything worked out in an almost textbook Just In Time implementation.

And that rollout of deliveries; a clear case of how beautiful logistics can be that no little snag can blemish. Well done maestro!

Door threshold: a concrete demonstration of a little but solid restoration. Caveat being one may need some sunglasses on approach. 😎

[Zombie]

Couldn't really get any painting done this week as I was far too busy. One of the bigger jobs I tackled was cleaning out the front cooler. We still had some leftover flowers in there from Mothers Day so I tossed out the old stuff and anything still usable went into fresh water again. Then I consolidated the remainder and put that in fresh water too. This means we had a lot of dirty buckets. I made a good start on cleaning some on Friday then finished off the rest yesterday between projects.

There's more stacks to the left of the door which aren't visible. We go through a lot of buckets when it's busy so I have to dip into our overflow stacks. I culled them out of the mix and put them off to the side to be rinsed out and put back in the overflow when dry. Now we can sorta get back to normal.

- Zombie

[Space Voyager]

Holy cow, that's a shitload of buckets!!! Mostly wall paint buckets?

[Zombie]

Actually none of them were from paint. I do have a few from paint in our overflow stacks but don't really like them due to how hard and messy it is to get them into a decent condition for flowers. The ones I have from paint I cleaned myself as I used them. Our buckets come from a variety of sources so I'll try to go over that.

First stack on the right is a couple big buckets on the bottom which we purchased years ago. Above that are black and white rectangular buckets (called "Procona") which we get in from "stock" and "larkspur" (these flowers arrive already in water - I'll try to get a pic of that when we get one in again). The small stack of gray and beige pails are "wash" buckets from a hardware store which we got for cheap.

The first big stack of white pails with handles (5 gallon) is from concentrated liquid flower food. We use maybe 4 of these in a year. This gets pumped and mixed with water to the correct ratio by the blue thing to the right of the sink (I'll try to get a better pic of this too). Perfect pails for flowers as they had food in them and are sterile.

The bigger stack of white pails next to that are 4 gallon pails from a variety of sources. I think we got most of these years ago from the local bakeries or ice cream factories. I think these were bulk raw eggs out of the shell, and some other ones were from frosting for bakery while still others had chocolate "chip" in them for ice cream (not chocolate chips, but chipped chocolate - those are two different animals). Not fun to clean these initially as you have to bleach them out multiple times to get them into usable condition.

The next stack of taller white pails is from powder flower food (the pail size goes by weight which is 36 pounds in this instance or 6.5 gallons). We go through maybe 5 or 6 of these a year and are basically ready to go when empty. Why do we have both powder and liquid? Well, the liquid is mixed as you pump it and there's no guessing involved. The powder I can control the concentration by adding more powder or to make buckets with warm water in them to allow flowers to hydrate better.

After that is a small stack of shorter black pails which we sometimes get in for free from one of our fresh flower suppliers. Not sure what all comes in them, but I know we used to get premade consumer bunches in them.

The last four stacks of black pails are commercial flower (or cooler) buckets we purchased from our wholesalers. As an aside, these sometimes get cracks in them and leak so I'm thinking of trying to "plastic weld" the leaking ones this summer. I think that might be interesting for this thread.

And of course we have other buckets too not represented in the pic like buckets from dill pickles (typically the buckets are green), laundry detergent, paint, commercial cleaning solutions, or even motor oil (talk about a headache to clean, these take the cake).

- Zombie

[Space Voyager]

Oooooooohhhh... now I'm stuck with mental image of buckets and buckets of ice cream... 😍

[Thorondor]

Talk about a bucket list!

The epitome of waste not, want not. And given the account, what we're seeing in the picture is the better part of a multi-sourced collection gathered throughout many years of activity. Not only that, but years of continued business growth that required that accumulation.

In short, a flowering history of relative abundance in more ways than one.

It's a plus that just a few buckets got cracked - though one wonders the specifics of why - while all the rest endure without issue.

But you seem to already have a solution for that too.

[Zombie]

So I took some pics today. I think it would be a little helpful to talk about the "Procona" buckets/system. First of all Procona stands for "From PROducer to CONsumer in Aqua". It was developed mainly because some flowers don't fare well when they are "dry" during shipping. They usually wilt quickly out of water and don't rehydrate well when you do get them in. So for this reason a three-piece shipping system that kept the flowers in water throughout transit while minimizing damage and splashing was developed. The bottom is a rectangular plastic bucket that usually has hand holes on the short sides and ventilation holes on the long sides. Above that is a cardboard sleeve the fits into the rim of the bucket. And the top is a piece of plastic that is mostly open to allow air circulation which sits on top of the cardboard sleeve and then the whole thing is strapped together.

Here's what the thing looks like all banded together:

You can probably see the water level in the bottom of the bucket. It's normally shipped with a minimum amount to prevent splashing (wet foliage could start to get moldy after a while). Undoing it is pretty simple: cut the straps off, lift off the lid and pull up the cardboard sleeve:

And in the case of stock (the flower type in the bucket) it usually has some tissue paper between the bunches and waxed tissue around the outside to prevent bruising. And recently the grower has started to wrap all the bunches together at the bottom with cling wrap (plastic film).

So we do occasionally use the Procona buckets for flowers. I keep a few stacks of them on hand as "throwaway" buckets - for instance, if a customer is picking up 100 carnations, we'll give them the carns in a procona bucket and then we don't have to worry about losing one of our cooler buckets which are much more expensive. I usually mention to the customer or write a note and attach it to the bucket asking for it back - either they can drop it off at the store or we'll pick them up so that way they don't have to worry about disposal or recycling. When we have too many, I send stacks of empty procona's (and the tops too!) back with one of our wholesalers and when their trucks go to the grower to pick up another load of flowers the driver will drop off the proconas for reuse. Better than recycling. Suppose we could try to resell them, but I don't think that's very environmentally friendly in the end as you just don't know where they will end up.

And I took a better pic of our liquid flower food dispenser/mixer called a "Dosatron" (the blue thing above the sink). The way we have it set up, hot and cold water is fed into a common copper line which then runs up to the backflow prevention device (it prevents the flower food solution from getting siphoned back into the supply lines and potentially fouling the water). It then runs back down into a stainless steel clad flexible line to attach to a ball valve (to shut off the water - that's what the orange handle is for). After that, the water goes into the blue bell where it is mixed with the flower food in the correct concentration (at the bottom of the unit is a clear siphon tube which goes into the pail of liquid flower food next to the sink). Then the water with the food in it goes into the blue hose with the "fuel pump" handle at the end and out into a bucket.

As for painting, I managed to caulk around the threshold of the door where I put the new concrete in today. I also figured out where I put my gallon of gray tinted primer so now I can put a second coat of primer on everything and when that's dry I can finally start putting polyurethane on it. Can't wait to get that done as it's so much nicer (and safer too). Though I might put a sand finish on the threshold so it's not slippery.

- Zombie

[Thorondor]

Color-coded, detailed instruction! I appreciate the educational effort, Zombie.

The effort that goes into the conservation shows care and the value placed on the goods. A flower's beauty is ephemeral though, and what is used to keep it alive can stick around for a long time so it's great that you go the distance to ensure some reuse.

As for the "Dosatron", one can say you painted a pretty good picture of how the whole circuit functions too, thank you.

Door threshold: you don't let anything slip by you, do you?

[Zombie]

I didn't really have a lot of time to do much on Saturday as I was busy delivering and cleaning the cooler, but I did finally get a second coat of primer on the threshold:

The paint was a little bit tacky when I took the pic because it was chilly and humid in the morning which increases dry time. But it was drying, especially in the sun. To be safe, I let that fully cure over the weekend, then put on a first coat of polyurethane this afternoon:

Pretty shiny! That black strip is a tread patch which is gritty so you don't slip on the metal. But I think I'm going to put a slight sand finish on the concrete part just to be safe. Looks like the stainless steel kickplate needs to be cleaned up a little. Oh, and the white mark on the red is seagull poop. Not sure how much time I'll have to paint this week as I'm planting graves at the cemetery again, but maybe Thurs or Fri I can tackle the sand finish to get that going.

- Zombie

[Thorondor]

That first coat of polyurethane has such a sheen right now, Zombie, that if you do get around to further polishing the kickplate you'll be able to boil eggs there.

Seagull bombing: veritable poison. Consider automated drone hive defense and restoration system.

Detects and drives away aerial threats. In case of any direct hits, sprays cleaning solution on the affected area immediately with high-pressure nozzle.

[Zombie]

Well, I made some time at the end of the day to work on the threshold again. I found my old can of gray polyurethane and had to remove a thick skin at the top first. After mixing I decided that I needed to adjust the dry time a bit. It was cloudy most of the day so the concrete would be cool and with a strong wind blowing I was afraid the paint would skin over but not cure completely so I mixed in a little bit of paint thinner to speed things up a bit. I brushed on a light coat to wet everything then sprinkled on some of that sand finish and then went over that with a heavy coat:

And a closeup (not sure how much you can tell, but there is sand in there):

After this dries I'm going to add two more coats over the top and it should be good to go. I need to decide if it's rough enough though and if it isn't I'll do another light sand coat again.

- Zombie