On Sat, 09 Apr 2005 19:24:50 GMT, wrote:
One day I finally realized what was wrong with my shoulders. I've
been painting my whole house in anticipation of new hardwood and
carpet. My shoulder pain was the direct result of me hand sanding the
walls.

If you've got a long-running house renovation in progress, it probably
won't be the first time you'll visit shoulder pain. I had it for
months after building a pair of fences in 2001:

http://www.magpie.com/house/photos/b...rd20040509.jpg

Even though I used a framing nailer, the gun's still quite heavy.
After driving several thousand nails the kickback gets to you, plus
digging a few dozen post holes by hand didn't help. Fortunately, the
neighbor who got the second fence is a chiropractor.

I re-injured it last year after tripping over one of those BigBoxStore
toilet paper packages in my shop and landing on the cement floor.
That stopped work cold for six weeks.

I had though about buying a $20 sander but thought I could save the
$20 by hand sanding.

So I finally broke down and bought a $20 electrical sander and the
paint job went much faster and the shoulder pain disappeared.

Yeah, that'll kill your shoulder, especially sanding ceilings. I
still prefer to do this mostly by hand with a sanding block because of
the dust that a power sander kicks up. What makes it worse is that my
walls are old, neglected plaster so I elected to skim coat many of
them after patching the cracks/holes. The finish work for that
generates an unbelievable amount of dust.

My local rental place has a power sander coupled to a shopvac-like
device but I've never tried it.

Steve Manes
Brooklyn, NY
http://www.magpie.com/house/bbs