Don't Ask Me How, I Just Live Here

Same back yard, one week later and fifty-five degrees warmer. There's no way to describe it other than just plain batshit crazy.

And I can't take advantage of the warmer temps by, say, going for a little walk around the neighborhood to finally get out of the house and stretch my legs for a bit, because it's raining! I suppose I could take a bumbershoot along, but then we're back to batshit crazy again. The weather can go ahead and act crazy if it wants to, but darned if I'm going to be a part of it.

"Do you ever feel any regrets about moving back to Wisconsin?" my Mom asked me the other night, and I told her "no," because that was the only self-respecting thing to say, but ...

Find The Brass Monkey

It's a state law that when the temperature plunges below zero, and if you have a blog, you have to post a photo of the thermometer and prattle on for a bit about how cold it is.

Man, is it cold! It is so cold in Wisconsin, all the brass monkeys go south for the winter.

I have to admit, I never got the brass monkey comparison. I always assumed it was code for something we weren't supposed to say in mixed company, but nobody ever told me the dirty version, so I've never been sure what "colder than a brass monkey" means.

In my neck of the woods, the more popular expression was, "Colder than a witch's tit in a brass bra." Brass seems to be a baseline for measuring cold temperatures, I supposed from way back when there used to be more brass door knobs and handles you had to grab hold of to get in out of the cold. Good thing they came up with the saying back then; with all the brushed aluminum and stainless steel out there now, "witch's tit in a brushed aluminum bra" just wouldn't trip off the tongue as satisfyingly.

When it's this cold, every trip from the house, no matter how short, becomes a major expedition you have to provision for. Is there a shovel and a bag of kitty litter in the trunk of the car to attempt a dig-out? Do you have at least a quarter tank of gas to run the engine in case you have to call for help? Are you wearing the requisite half-dozen layers of clothes? I wouldn't even walk to the end of the driveway for the morning paper on a morning like this, and in fact, I didn't. I figured I could read it on-line from the comfort of my easy chair where I can stay wrapped up in quilts. That's how cold it is.

I Love This Backpack!

Tim's kitty getting some love from his backpack.

Hang 'Em High

Today's Home Improvement Project #1: Give My Darling B a place to keep her stemware.

The china hutch is full, there's no room in the cupboards for them, and there's no room for shelves anywhere.

The solution? Find a place to hang them. I've seen these stemware tracks on the underside of shelfwork in wine bars. The only trick was to find a place to hang them, but B suggested the underside of the counter end, which worked out fine.

Then I ran to the store to buy some wooden cleats and some pine lath, cut it to length and tapped it into place with some finishing nails. The most rewarding home improvement projects are the ones that are easiest, yet still produce impressive results. I'm going to get a kiss for this one, I can feel it.

What Would Chief Al Say?

I'm this close to having hair long enough to pull back in a ponytail. I asked My Darling B to show me how to tie it back, but she went further than that: she combed it and tied it with an elastic band from a tin of them she had in her store of hair-care stuff. Considering that she told me years ago she'd leave me if I ever grew a ponytail, I'm gratified she not only accepted my latest phase of middle-age denial, she also took part in helping style it.

Even though it's still pretty short, I wore it back this way when we went to the market, and blended in pretty effectively with the rest of the organic-food crowd.

I may have to wait another four to eight weeks before I have a ponytail that's more like the founding father look I'm shooting for and less a middle-aged man trying to look like a kid again, although in my defense I've never had hair this long before in my life, so I don't think I'm in denial if I'm trying it for the first time.

Adventures in Plumbing

Success! It took all day to get the water running again and, more importantly, to get the waste water to go where it was supposed to go, but I finally had everything hooked up in time to hand the kitchen over to My Darling B, who planned on a pizza for dinner tonight.

Look at the size of that thing! It looked nice and big in the store, but once I got it installed it looked even BIGGER! I could probably climb in there and take a bath! And I needed one, after taking apart the drain pipes and playing in the muck.

Adventures in Plumbing

Time for Adventures in Plumbing, where I take apart some vital piece of our house's waterworks, then try to figure out how to put it back together again.

Today, I tore out the kitchen sink. It was made of stainless steel, divided down the middle, and the faucet began to make an annoying knocking sound about two weeks ago that has gotten worse with each passing day.

The sink also had a garbage disposal attached to it, just to make the operation more interesting.

I planned to replace it with an enameled cast iron sink that was divided into a large and a small bowl, but when I went to the store to buy it, I found that it was made in China. Whoops. My Darling B would never have allowed me to bring that through the door, so I quickly re-evaluated the choices.

Everything was made in China except for a selection of divided stainless steel sinks much like the one I was trying to get rid of, and a number of acrylic sinks. I wasn't crazy about them at first, but found one in stock that had a single, huge bowl we'd be able to wash even our largest frying pans and platters in, and went with that.

Even though I got what I thought was an early start, I ended up working on this project until dinner time. It should go without saying that I've never removed a kitchen sink before, nor installed one.

Found! A Better TP Dispenser!

The O-Folk once lived in Japan many, many moons ago, and fell in love with their gadgets, the best of which, and one that we could afford to bring back with us, was this toilet paper dispenser. When the roll runs out, all you have to do is lift up on the empty core and two little swing arms let it pop right off. Then you push a new roll up through the spring arms, and they snap into the core. Presto! Chango! Even the O-Folk can handle that.

We liked these so much, we bought two, but the most frustrating thing about moving is that the things you're most looking forward to as you unpack are stashed away in the last box you open. These dispensers were in a box that's been shoved way to the back of a shelf all these years. I didn't find them again until tonight and was so pleased by the discovery that I installed it straight away.

The simplest things are the ones we treasure, right?

Give Me A Call

The paint job on the Western Electric 202 turned out pretty good after all.

I bought a spray can of clear coat that put a beautiful finish on it, not glossy but semi-gloss. It looks just right on a telephone body.

The next problem is the handset. The one that came with the phone is a transplant. The 202 is an elegant-looking phone, but it needs a genuine E1 handset with a "spit cup" mouth piece or it just doesn't have the same character. I'm scoping out sales on e-bay for the real thing and have found several in the past two weeks, but they're expensive. I may have to make due with the transplant for a while.

It's so heavily pitted that it'll take quite a bit of sanding and buffing before it comes close to matching the finish on the body.

The cord's pretty nasty, but I'll order a cloth-covered cord new from House of Telephones on payday. That ought to give me enough time to polish a good-looking shine on the handset.

Wait For Dial Tone

The cradle presents its own set of problems, not the least of which is the need to zap it from a dozen different directions to get an evenly-applied coat.

This is the second trip the cradle has made to the paint booth. The first application was very uneven, so after sanding out the roughest spots I tried again this afternoon. I'm less than pleased with the result. You can easily see the globby paint inside the cradle arms.

I've started doing a little research on the interwebs after noting that the handset that came with this phone was a transplant. It's not even a Western Electric handset. From what I can tell, the 202 should have an E1 handset, which has a knobby look and a mouthpiece with a "spit cup." I found a few on e-bay, but none at the bargain prices my skinflint sensibilities will let me bid on.

After cleaning my Western Electric 302 this afternoon, I strongly suspect the dial of my 202 is a transplant, too. It's got a plastic number card under the finger wheel; the 302's dial had a porcelain face. What are the odds that Western Electric would have used plastic in the earlier version of their desk phones, and porcelain in later versions? Smells fishy to me.

Wait For Dial Tone

... and this is about forty-five minutes after spraying one coat as light as I could get it using a can of Krylon. It's probably my most successful attempt so far. There are some scratches evident in the paint, but I'm thinking of overspraying with a clear fixative and polishing it a bit to see how that looks.

Wait For Dial Tone

It usually looks pretty good while the paint is still wet ...

Wait For Dial Tone

Here's another reason I don't want to rush into painting anything. This is the D1 base of a Western Electric 202, and I've been trying for almost two weeks to apply a smooth coat of glossy black paint to it, but the damned paint keeps krinkling up like this around the shoulders. The last coat I gave it got me so cheesed off I set it aside for three days before I came back to it this afternoon with a patch of 100 grit paper, sanded off three or four layers, smoothed it over with some 220 grit and put it in the paint booth to give it another zap.

Wait For Dial Tone

The reassembled dial after cleaning. The face is badly scratched and the paint is worn from inside most of the fingerholes, but I didn't want to repaint it today, if I ever do. I don't necessarily want it to look pristine. The scratches aren't especially good-looking, but the worn finger holes give the dial a comforting feeling of constant use. I'll have to give a good, long think to whether or not I'll repaint it.

Wait For Dial Tone

With the finger wheel removed, the dial cleans up easily. It looks and feels like porcelain. That part number would probably tell me exactly what it was made of and when, if I knew where to look. A quick googling doesn't clear up the question, though.

Most people who restore phones take the whole thing apart before they even start cleaning, but all I wanted to do today was clean the dust and grease off the parts so that, after making a call, I wouldn't have the same uneasy feeling I get when I give my nose a quick wipe without the benefit a handkerchief. Not that I would ever do such a revolting thing. Ever. Forget I said that.

Wait For Dial Tone

The first working dial telephone I bought from an e-bay auction was this Western Electric Model 302, and I liked it so much that I wired a 4-prong outlet in the living room so I could plug it in and use it right away.

I had to give the handset a good, long scrubbing in warm, soapy water before My Darling B would even consider using it, though. She'll put up with a lot of weirdness from me, but her love has its limits.

I swore I'd get around to cleaning and refurbishing the rest of the phone at a later date, to be determined by the availability of time and funds and, little by little, I've managed to keep up an erratic schedule of restoring it to something close to its former glory. I replaced the cords a week or two ago, and today I took it to the basement to take apart and clean the dial which, you can see here, is still covered in nearly sixty years of grunginess.

A Cookie You Can Believe In

Seen at the farmer's market this weekend: The Obama Cookie. Way cool. McCain doesn't have a cookie. This may be a game-changer.

When My Darling B handed over the cash to pay for it, the guy standing in line behind her said, "He's going to give you change you can believe in."

ba-dum-bum! tssss ...

Mystery Photo #42

I took the bottom off this and snapped a photo before taking everything apart so that I'd have a reference when the time came to put it all back together. It needed cleaning and painting, and all the wires and circuits had to come out before I could even begin. First correct guess wins an Oreo, America's Favorite Cookie!

Bigger is Better

When we bought Our Humble O'Bode, I was thrilled to find that one of the previous owners had been a handyman who set up a work shop in the basement. He had saved an end table from the garbage to use as a bench, and hung his tools from a 4x4 piece of peg board he screwed to the wall.

The down side was that the work shop was shoehorned into a narrow space that used to be storage for the storm windows, between the lavatory and a finished room. I couldn't build anything bigger than a bird house in there.

But this season's going to be different. I talked My Darling B into letting me knock down a wall and make the work shop big enough to move around in. With this kind of room, I might be able to take on a more ambitious project than a bird house, too.

For a view of the work shop shortly after we moved in, take a look at this.

Lair Transplant

Behold, the contents of my basement lair, removed to its new location.

Each night this week, I would spend about an hour unloading books from one of these bookshelves, piling them on the floor, dragging the book case from the semi-finished room to this corner, and restacking the books on the shelves.

Actually, after the bookcase on the right, the next think I moved was the stereo, so I could listen to Etta James while I moved the rest of the books.

I dragged the desk out right in the middle of the move, just to break up the monotony, and to give me the idea to stand the two peewee bookshelves in front of it. It was a eureka moment.

By Thursday night, I was done.

It's a lot less crowded than it looks, although the sofa will have to go. I'm going to ask Tim to help me drag it out to the curb this morning and prop a "Free To A Good Home" sign on it in the hopes that it'll be gone by Sunday night and we won't have to drag it back downstairs.

The new corner lair does need a better set of lights, but that might have to wait a little while. For now, it's bright enough for the kind of goofing off I do.

Guy Food Night

Nothing like that smell, is there?

Thursday night is guy food night, an old O-Folk tradition that stretches back two, maybe three years. It's the night when the guys cook, so My Darling B doesn't have to.

The trouble with this great idea is, I can cook two things: breakfast, or a thick slab of meat on the grill. For tonight's meal, I chose to serve breakfast.

Make room! Make room!

An "after" snapshot to compare to last Wednesday's. So much demolition has been going on here, it's hard to correlate this to anything in the previous photo. The saws on the peg board to the left are in both photos.

A New Coat of Paint

Old coat, no coat, new coat.

The darkest wine-colored paint is the color we picked out for the top coat, called "Cottage Red" in the Benjamin-Moore vocabulary of color. I couldn't wait any longer to see what it looked like so, while I was at the store to pick up another gallon of primer, I asked the paintmeister to mix up a quart of it so I could slap it on the back corner of the house.

My Darling B approves.

A New Coat of Paint

It's the final coat of paint without the distracting purple primer or any bare boards to muck up the view. I'm very relieved to find it covers very nicely with one coat.

Make room! Make room!

Only the skeletal outline of the closet that once jutted into the corner of the work shop, taking up valuable floor space, remained in this photo I took two nights ago. Since then, I've pulled down the shelves to the right, most of the rest of the furring strips framing the wall, and started pulling down the gypsum board.

That stuff all takes up room in the garbage can, the only way I have to get rid of the stuff, which is why I'm going slow.

I've also got to work out what I'm going to do with all the books in the lair. There's a couple hundred to move and I'm not looking forward to it. My Darling B has consented to let me move some of them upstairs. Eventually I'd like to build a wall-to-wall book shelf in the living room and move most of them up there, where we can get at them and they'll look much cooler.

Make room! Make room!

It's raining today, so as I was looking around for a indoor project I thought, hey, it's about time to flip the workshop door over.

The door to the work shop opened in the wrong direction. It had always opened into the work shop, and the hinge was on the wrong side so that, when the door was open, it blocked the very narrow entrance. Totally ganked up.

The simplest way to fix it would be to remove the door, but I liked that door and the work shop should probably be closed off from the rest of the basement, to keep the sawdust in. So I decided the door had to stay.

The next simplest way to fix it, I thought innocently, would be to flip the hinges around so it opened into the stairway. So I marked the door jamb, sharpened my chisel and started cutting.

Two hours later I was still learning lessons in how to hang a door. Here's a very important bit of information: get somebody who knows what they're doing to help you.

And yet, somehow, I still managed to get it flipped over well before supper time. Here's the door hanging ajar in its new, correctly hung direction.

The whole point of this endeavor was to make more room in the work shop for the projects I hope to get done this winter. There's just one more little thing I'd like to do. See that wall in the background? It's coming down.

Bringing in the potatoes

My Darling B went through the potato patch with her trusty fork, hoping to find the last of the big baking potatoes to put up for the winter. There were precious few to be found. Most were teensy-tiny and covered in malformed knobs, and a few had been in the ground far too long; they went straight to the compost heap.

Then we spent the afternoon scraping paint off the siding. I even slapped some primer on the corner, so I wouldn't lie awake tonight thinking of how rotten the wood panels would get after soaking all day in rain that's predicted for tomorrow.

If the browned corn stalks in the background don't say autumn, I don't know what does.

Hello, Central!

After I moved the phone from the kitchen to the living room, I decided I hated the cordless model we had. I'm pretty sure I've always hated it. The sound quality of the handset is terrible and the ringer makes the most annoying bleat ever heard by a human ear.

I wanted another, better phone but, frankly, I'm not as jazzed about cordless models as I used to be. If I got a phone with a cord, though, I'd have to teach myself not to walk too far from the base. That could be a trick. I'd also have to learn to put up with the base jumping up at me every time I lifted the receiver. What brain-dead designer thought making the base light as a feather was a good idea, anyway? When did people start to think it was a bad thing for the base to be heavy as a cinder block, so it would stay rooted in one spot?

The more I thought about it, the more dissatisfied I was with virtually every phone we've had since I bought an old rotary phone at a garage sale fifteen years ago and used it as an extension phone. There wasn't anything great about it. It was a basic, beige table phone right out of the 1970's but it worked great. Tim, who was about three years old at the time, watched me plug it in and listen to the dial tone on the receiver, then spin the dial. "Cool!" he said, watching the dial return to zero. There was a pause of about a heartbeat before he asked, "What is it?"

Suddenly, I wanted one.

So I went cruising e-bay to see if there were any for sale. Holey cheese, were there ever. The trouble was not finding a dial phone, the trouble was finding one for less than ten bucks. People have made a hobby out of collecting them. The upside is, those old phones look really cool now!

The one I finally found for our living room table is a Western Electric model 302 from the 1940's. I was amazed that it not only worked right out of the box, but that I could dial out. Our phone service still supports pulse dialing, how quaint. When the new set of cords I've ordered arrives I'll break it all down and give it a thorough cleaning. In the meantime I washed the grubbiness off the handset with warm, soapy water and a couple washcloths. Otherwise, My Darling B wouldn't touch it.

Tim still loves to spin the dial. I showed him how to make the phone ring and he won't stop doing that, either.

What's better than a Bernina?

Hmmm ... let's see ... the love of your life ... a day off from work ... a six-pack of Mad Town Nut Brown ... oh, lots of things.

What I should have more properly asked was, What's better for sewing than a Bernina? And the answer would be, of course, that nothing is better for sewing than a Bernina except two Berninas.

My Darling B won this classic Bernina at an estate sale. It runs like a top and she walked away with it after being the only bidder. She had to part with a single sawbuck for the privilege. There's a pretty good story about how that played out, but I've already written it out once before.

I convinced My Darling B to crank it up the other night and hem a pair of trousers I bought at the irregular store. The tag said it was a 33/35 but it was more like a 33/49. When I put them on, the waist fit perfectly but the legs bunched up around my ankles like a pair of dad's slacks on an eight-year-old.

Well, here we are again ...

... but at least it's not ninety degrees in the shade.

I didn't start until after one o'clock, when the sun was far enough past noon that I was working in shadow. Hot enough working in heavy denim coveralls without the sun beating down on my shoulders, too.

The work went fairly quickly. As you can see, we were able to scrape off most of the thick, dark latex paint that takes forever to grind off because it clogs up the sanding belts and calls for a lot of elbow grease.

I wish there was a way to attach a shop vac to the sander. Grinding all that paint off the house leaves a thick layer of grayish dust all over. I try to catch it with the drop cloth, but quite a bit of it inevitably drifts away, settling as far away as the deck. It's impossible to cover the whole yard in drop cloth; I'm not Christo.

This is as far as I could get in an afternoon. I really wanted to sand the paint off that topmost white board, but even standing on a ladder it was about a foot over my head, and I just didn't have the strength left in my arms to do it. Maybe tomorrow ... or, maybe not.

How to pass the time

Scraping paint has become an almost zen-line activity. It's not mindless; I have to concentrate in order to get just the right angle on the blade to get it under the paint yet keep it from gouging the wood siding. And yet it's so repetitious and endless that each stroke becomes a mantra that sedates my consciousness. I listen for the clock in the kitchen to chime the top of the hour and I'm always surprised at how quickly it comes.

It may not look like much progress, but I assure you we chipped quite a lot of paint off today. You see that part over the air conditioning unit? That was solid dark paint all the way up until I went at it today. The stuff between the windows was especially hard to chip away; it's not nearly as brittle as most of the rest of it. And the paint on the wall behind the airco unit is a bitch to get at. The best angle I've managed to find is from above by sitting on the unit and working between my splayed legs. Fine work for a contortionist, but I can take about five or ten minutes of that, tops, before I feel ready for a full-body cast.

Progress check

On the theory that nothing happens unless you blog about it – and what's a blog post without a photo? – here's a snapshot of the back wall of the O-Home after B and I spent a collective four or five hours scraping paint off the siding.

The dark paint still remaining between the windows was too powerfully stuck to the house for our mere mortal strength to remove. We left it for later when I'll put on my home-made hazmat suit, slide a spanking new 50-grit belt in the power sander and grind away until I'm down to bare wood. Can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to that.

What did you do after dinner?

We're at it again.

We picked up a pizza on the way home and gobbled it down in about a half-hour, leaving us about ten minutes of daylight. Rushing outside to grab our scrapers and, in B's case, mask and gloves, we got back to work peeling paint off the siding. Fun!

The before and after photos below illustrate the challenge of trying to get any work done in the short time left between getting home after work and the point when it becomes too dark to see. The top photo was taken at about six-fifteen; the bottom photo, just before seven-thirty.

I offered to rig some lights, but B said, "No."

The paint looks remarkably good on the back of the house, not at all like the blistering, peeling paint that was on the side of the house. If I pick at it just a little bit, though, I end up peeling it away in sheets as big as my hand.

The weekend's supposed to be warm and clear. I guess I know where we'll be and what we'll be doing. *sigh*

Home improvement called on account of rain

It rained all day yesterday, all last night, and all morning today, making it impossible to sand or paint. We could scrape, but standing in the mud with rainwater running down our backs into our pants would make the task even more miserable than it was in the hot sun.

That's our story, and we're sticking to it.

Tucked In For a Long Winter's Nap

My Darling B has spent the morning putting up vegetables from her garden: She converted a whole mess of tomatoes to sauce, and while she did that, she soaked the stems of these garlic bulbs under a wet towel so she could braid them together and hang them in the basement where they'll keep through the winter.

We're not all about painting and home improvement here at Our Humble O’Bode. Thank dog.

Almost Frame-ous

I tore out all the rotten molding around this window, I tore out the rotten awning window at the bottom, I put in a new window and new molding, and I'm feeling pretty damned pleased with myself right about now.

The finishing touch was to caulk around the edges of the molding to try to keep the new wood safe from rot for a while.

I'll have to tear it all out again next summer to replace the single-pane windows, top and middle, but that's so far into the future it hurts to think about it. Right now I'm sitting fat, dumb and happy.

What I saw

I bought a new hand saw. I had to. I spent twenty minutes trying to rip half an inch off the width of a piece of brick molding with the trusty but old and dull hand saw that's been in my tool box for at least ten years, probably as much as fifteen. It's still a good saw, but now that I'm in my forties I can't keep flailing away as long as I could when I was thirty.

I stopped once about halfway through the cut and considered running to the store for a new saw right then, but we were trying to get as much done after supper as we could, and I was losing daylight fast. A trip to the store would take at least fifteen minutes, maybe as much as twenty or twenty-five, if I ran into a snag (and I always run into a snag), so I kept at it. Five more minutes passed and the kerf lengthened maybe an inch or two. When I stopped to catch my breath and get my strength back, I had to think about running to the store again.

No. I had to get something done tonight. I bent to the task and started again. The cut lengthened another inch. Now my arms were becoming numb. I had to think about each and every stroke to keep going. Finally I stopped cold, set the saw down, went inside to get the car keys, and bolted down the road toward the hardware store.

Fifteen minutes later I had a brand new, sharp saw. A saw so sharp I had to hold it back, or rather hold myself back. After pushing hard on the old saw, I had to adjust my technique to ease the new saw into the cut, guide it more carefully through the kerf, and, when I got a knuckle a little too close to the teeth, remember that this was not the older, more forgiving saw I'd been using for years.

I didn't have much daylight left, but in the short time I did have I managed to cut two lengths of brick molding and fit them around the window. Tomorrow I'll cut and fit the other two lengths and caulk around the whole window so it's finally sealed from the elements and I can take down the plastic sheet covering it once and for all.

Let the sun shine in

I finished framing the new window this afternoon and tacking the trim back in place. Except for staining, the inside is done. I think it might have been harder than tearing out the old window and installing the new one. All the trim's got to fit just right or it ends up looking really sloppy, as, I fear, it looks to some extent now, but if I may say so it's not too bad for my first window.

Still have to cut the brick molding to fit and nail it in place around the outside. I spent about a half-hour scraping hardened caulk and flaking paint away from the rough edges. I'll make a double-check tomorrow evening and start cutting some molding if I have time. Hope to have everything nailed up and caulked before the end of the week.

I can see clearly now

About two and a half months ago, I tore away the rotten molding around this window, thinking I would replace it in an afternoon. After exposing the awning window at the bottom and discovering it was rotting away, too, my afternoon project revealed itself to be no longer quick or cheap.

I put in an order for a new window shortly afterward. Owing to the odd size, there weren't a lot of choices to be had. I went with the Anderson window because it was the best one I could find and it cost only thirty dollars more than the cheapest I could find. In the meantime, I covered the window with heavy plastic sheeting to keep out the wind and rain, and waited. The window finally came from the factory week before last. You may be able to guess why I didn't install it last weekend.

Today was a pretty nice day for tearing a hole in the side of your house to install a window, cool and sunny with a fair breeze. I started by prying all the molding off the inside frame, but that didn't reveal a easy way to remove the old window, as I'd hoped it would. It fit so snugly into the rough opening that it betrayed no screw or nail fasteners, so I fell back on my tried and true method of deconstruction: I fetched my saw and started cutting. Five minutes later, the old window lay in pieces on the deck and I was poking the nozzle of the shop vac into the nooks and crannies to make a clean hole for the new window.

The new window's got a vinyl outer cover with flashing all around. I don't like the look of vinyl much, but if it keeps the weather out for years and years I suppose I can learn to live with it. The inside of the window's a nice blonde pine. I used pine furring strips to frame it up, too, even though we'll probably end up staining it to match the rest of the trim around the room.

I worked on installation until around four in the afternoon, when I called it quits on account of I wanted to sit on my butt for a while and blog. I hope to finish the framing and tack the molding back into place tomorrow.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I would like some cheese with that wine

This is me, not scraping or sanding or painting the house.

Labor Day Scrape Away - Final Day

It is done. The primer coat, anyway. At this point, we're calling that a significant milestone.

It's humbling to note that, when we began this adventure eighteen days ago, we believed we could have painted the whole house by now. Today, with an entirely different perspective, we'll be happy to have the back of the house sanded and primed before winter. If we can manage to get the top coat on, too, that'll just be icing on the cake. Butter icing. With big, sweet roses.

Labor Day Scrape Away - Final Day

We are just too damned happy to finally be painting instead of scraping and sanding, you wouldn't believe it.

I get to climb the ladder to paint the upper siding panels and B gets to paint the lower panels, because she's a girl. No, that's not it, it's because she's scared to climb the ladder. No, that's not it, either, it's because she possesses a special knowledge of painting ground-level wood siding that I lack. That's it.

This pink Pepto-Bismol-looking color is the priming coat, by the way. The top coat will be a much darker red brick color, and I was assured by the two experts at the paint department of Ace Hardware that it would cover the primer in one coat. If it doesn't, I'm going to bring what's left of the primer back to Ace and dump it on their heads.

It took us about two hours to paint this much of the side, so I think we'll be done by mid-afternoon and I'm lobbying hard for an early end to the work-weekend so we can enjoy the final hours of our extended Labor Day weekend sitting on our butts on the back deck, probably with cold brewskis in our hands.

Labor Day Scrape Away and Pastry-eating Fantasy

VICTORY!

It took every particle of strength I had in me, but I finished sanding the north side of the house.

No fair pointing out the gable is still painted.

It's okay, really, the paint on the gable seems to be bubble-free and unpeeling, so we're going to paint over it and hope for the best.

I picked up a gallon of primer and a couple of paint buckets at the local Ace Hardware store this afternoon and, if all goes according to plan, we'll spend tomorrow afternoon with paint brushes in our hands.

Labor Day Scrape Away and Pastry-eating Fantasy

Holy Crap, This Sucks!

I can't remember the last time I did anything that wore me out like this. Wrapping myself in quilts and lifting weights all day would seem easier.

I started sanding at about two o'clock in the afternoon and finished up just before five, with a fifteen-minute break to stand in front of a fan while I drank all the ice water I could hold.

Those two siding panels right above the windows go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, by the way. And on. And on and on. Okay, I'll stop now.

Labor Day Scrape - Day Three

My Darling B, on the other hand, can work tirelessly all through the day. She's been at this since I started sanding, and kept right on after I coiled up the extension cord and went in for a twenty-minute shower. (No photos of that, promise.)