Prep work sucks. Once you’ve picked a color and gone to the paint store and brought home a bright, shiny new color, you want to see it on something! You don’t want to spend the next three days cleaning, sanding, wood filling, taping off and priming.

Unfortunately, you have to.

I guess you’ve probably gathered by now that I chose a color for the interior of the radio. But before I share what I chose, let’s talk about prep work. Cuz seriously? Someone needs to share this pain.

The process was actually pretty simple, if time consuming. I wiped off the whole interior of the piece with a damp rag just so I could see what I was working with. Remember how I mentioned it was dusty? Let’s upgrade that to completely dirty and disgusting. Next I sanded the whole thing, making sure to get all the dust off with the Shop Vac and another damp rag. For the record, don’t use your regular household vacuum on this kind of really fine dust. I learned that the hard way when I painted our kitchen cabinets and had to spend $60 having the motor repaired on our bagless vacuum.

Then I used wood filler on all the little holes, dents and rough places. Once it had dried, I sanded it all again and wiped it down again.

I decided to tape off the edges so I would be sure not to get paint on the wood that I refinished five years ago when I first got the radio. And then came the priming. This piece has an awful lot of little spaces to paint. I tried using a small cabinet and door foam roller on the largest sections, but then had to move to a short-handled angle brush and finally little artist’s paint brush to get into all the crevices.

But now it’s primed! If i were painting the interior a light color, I might follow up with another round of primer, but since I’m going dark, I think the way it is now is going to be fine.

Now, onto painting! I’ll just give you a little hint at what color I chose: it rhymes with shoe.