The long pole in the tent: building our paint booth

Have you ever seen a "portable" gazebo tumbling over and over propelled by a mild breeze in a park or at the beach causing havoc as people try to avoid being speared by its flimsy pole legs?

That's the look I'm hoping for when I eventually take my not-bought-for-the-scooter-project-at-all-darling gazebo to said park or beach.

For now, though, with some plastic sheets to fill in the sides, it'll be used as a makeshift paint booth to turn our faded, flaky scooter body into a gem.

I picked up the cheapest gazebo I could find at Target and we started assembling it inside the garage.

If you've ever erected (stop sniggering) a tent, you'll find this gazebo a breeze to put up. There are approximately 500 million pieces to it, but they all fit together logically.

Our biggest problem was the sheer size of it (that's what she said). Fully erec... umm, assembled, it's 8.5' tall (at the peak) and 10x10' square. Plenty of room to maneuver inside, but it won't fit in the garage.

We shuffled it out the garage door until it was sort of half-in-half-out, then set about taping the world's thinnest plastic drop sheets to the "tent pole" legs.

Fortunately, last Saturday was a hot, humid, windless day, so we taped one side of our booth without any trouble. Unfortunately, 30 seconds later a butterfly flew past and apparently farted (it's the only explanation I have), causing the entire sheet to billow out like a sail and peel off our pathetic attempts at taping.

Having built the workbench at the start of this project, we luckily had some 2x4 off-cuts, so set about using them as weights to keep the sheet pinned down as best we could, before quickly putting up the other sides in a vain attempt to block the butterfly farts. It worked well enough for us to hang the exhaust and give that a second coat, but soon fell apart.

Not wanting to experience "death by tumbling gazebo" just yet, we simply moved on to other project tasks. If at first you don't succeed... give up, is my rule.

Actually, our plan is to remove 4 of the 500 million pieces from the legs to lower it sufficiently, so it will fit in the garage. Then we'll try putting the sheets up again and hope for the best.

We'll see...