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.)

Labor Day Scrape - Day Three

Dammit. I really wanted to finish off that patch above the window on the right, but I just didn't have enough steam left for it.

Labor Day Scrape - Day Three

So today I finally had to climb the extension ladder to finish sanding paint off the north wall of the house.

I've been dreading this for weeks. Up until now, the most difficult position I've worked in was on my knees, to sand the lowest siding panels about a foot and a half off the ground. Working off the top of the six-foot ladder was no trouble at all, just like standing, really, and I could reach all the panels up to the top of the six-foot ladder from the ground.

But now, all that's left is too high to get to from the six-footer, so I have no choice but to climb the extension ladder.

Maybe you can understand better how that's a problem if I point out that, for the most part, sanding is easiest when I'm holding the sander right in front of my solar plexus. I can reach as high as my nipples or drop it down to my waist without too much trouble, and I can hold the sander head-high for five or ten minutes before I need a breather.

Working off the extension ladder, though, is all reaching. There's no practical way to get at the wall directly behind the ladder, so I have no choice but to reach for the siding on the left and the siding on the right, and I can't reach far. At most, I can sand away a patch of paint eight to ten inches wide on both sides of the ladder, then I have to climb down, shift it to one side, climb back up, do it again.

I've been at it since about ten o'clock this morning and I'm already pretty much beat. It's a good thing I'm working in shadow and there's a fair breeze blowing past the house because I don't think I would have lasted this long otherwise. The coveralls and leather gloves are absolutely necessary but hot as hell. Five minutes after I suit up and start sanding I'm drenched in sweat so that, when I peel out of them an hour or so later, it's like struggling out of a dripping-wet sleeping bag.

But I've got to go back out now. I don't want to quit before I've finished off that patch of paint between the windows, and I'd like to get up two panels beyond that. Keep me in your thoughts.

Labor Day Scrape - Day Two

While B scraped paint off the siding around the corner, I got a start sanding the back corner of the house where I was peeling the paint off yesterday.

After two hours of grinding away with a belt sander, I wore out three belts and had worked halfway up the window.

I didn't forget to shut the window; I took this photo after I went and opened the room up after I showered and changed.

Okay, I did forget. I noticed as I was sanding away under the window that it was still open a crack and, because I was dressed in coveralls, head sock and respirator, and was covered head to toe in sawdust, I had to ask B to run in and close it.

Most of the siding's really rather attractive after all the paint's sanded away. Looks like it could be cedar. Too bad we're not going to stain it. If we wanted to, I'm pretty sure we'd have to replace quite a few of the panels that haven't weathered as well as these have.

Labor Day Scrape - Day Two

Can you tell which window I repaired? It's the one on the right. Sort of looks like I knew what I was doing, doesn't it?

B's hard at work scraping off the last of the paint globs still hanging on under the siding panels where the belt sander can't reach, no matter how many different ways I try to orient the thing.

Tomorrow I'm going to sand up to the two panels above the windows, then do what B's doing. If I can possibly manage to get all that done before Monday, we can have this primed before the long weekend's over.

Labor Day Scrape - Day Two

Water got in behind the woodwork in the lower corners, so the bottom three or four inches of the lumber that faced the elements were so rotten I had to cut it away and replace it.

The close quarters made it hard to cut. I could get the nose of my hand saw in just far enough to sort of nibble away at it, being careful not to cut into the vinyl window or the siding.

Most of the rot underneath was soft enough to easily remove with the corner of a scraping tool. A shop vac cranked all the way up to "Full Suck" was pretty good at cleaning out the deepest recesses.

Somebody tried to repair this corner before by pumping it full of expanding foam. I pulled most of it out making sure I got all the rotten wood.






All the woodwork in place, not yet caulked.

Labor Day Scrape - Day Two

I didn't mean to rip out the brick molding around this window today. The windows were going to be a project for another day, but when I climbed the ladder to scrape the paint off the panel just above, I found that the molding up there was soft and rotten, which made me climb down to check out the rotten molding I had already seen in the corners down there ...

I'm easily distracted. It's a flaw I've learned to live with by giving in occasionally, and I figured today it wouldn't matter much if I took a break from scraping to pry off the old brick molding, cut some new molding to fit and finish off this one window so I wouldn't lie awake during the next all-night rain shower, wondering how much water was getting in through the rot.

Brick molding is remarkably easy to remove; just set the foot of a wrecking bar against the edge where you know there's a gap, tap it into the gap with a hammer, then lean back and let the bar lever it away from the house. Wrecking bars are so monstrously useful that I have two. When I pried the gap open with the first, I slipped the foot of the other wrecking bar in above it, leaned back again to open the gap further, pulled the first bar out and repositioned it above the second, and kept walking right up the window like that until the whole length of lumber came away. Easy-peasy.

I'm always a little amazed at how a house is pieced together like a puzzle you can take apart. Figure out how to get new pieces and maintenance is fairly simple.

I'm also amazed when B lets me do stuff like this. She was standing just an arm's length away as I worked. Every time I start a project that involves levering pieces of lumber off the house I half-expect her to place her mortal body between me and the house, stand arms akimbo and demand to know what the hell I was thinking of doing. Somehow, I've got her buffaloed into believing I know how to make these repairs, when the fact my method is to pull things off, take a good look at the parts and try to cipher out how I could fix up new parts that would fit together in more or less the same way. It seems likely that, one of these days, I'll pull off a part I can't replace, but it hasn't happened yet. Knock wood.

Labor Day Scrape - Day One

The good news: I've got the day off!

The bad news: I'm staying home to scrape and sand.

After dropping B at work, I came back, read the morning paper while I ate a roll and drake a hot cuppa mud, then set to work scraping paint off the back of the house. It faces east. The sun was blazing. I was able to keep that up for maybe twenty minutes
before I had to seek shade on the north side of the building, where I scraped paint off the corner caps until around ten-thirty when I had to run an errand into town to pick up a window and a beanbag chair. Did you know you can still buy beanbag chairs? It surprised me, too.

By the time I came home the sun was high enough that the eaves were throwing a shadow down half the wall, not enough to make me happy, so I went back around the side of the house and finished of scraping paint off the corner caps, and even peels a few sheets off the north side, way up top. I have no idea how long I did that; maybe an hour, maybe a little more, but I didn't go around to the back until the whole wall was in shade and I could work on the ladder without having the sun burning my butt.

All the paint comes off this side of the house like the strip hanging in the photo. With nothing else to do, I made a game out of how long I could make the peel go. I got this one to go from the corner to the window. The paint on the lower panels was too brittle to peel off in sheets that long, and some of the panels have cracked, breaking the paint into crazy quilt pieces.

It's beginning to look a lot like progress ...

The evening's daylight was fading fast as I snapped this shot of the north side of Our Humble O'Bode. I had just finished spending an hour sanding with some heavy grit paper on a belt sander, hoping to extend that straight line of paint-free panels all the way across, but the belt separated when I was still three feet short of my goal. You can just make out, to the right of the ladder, where the sanded panels end and the chipped paint begins.

I can begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel. I plan to do a bit more sanding on Thursday night, and I've taken time off from work Friday and Tuesday to stretch the Labor Day weekend to a full five days. With some persistence and some good weather, I should be able to get this side of the house primed and make a good start sanding the back. (We dangled a ten-dollar-an-hour bribe in front of Tim to see if he'll help scrape paint. Stay tuned.)

The Many Faces of Our Humble O'Bode

There are at least four coats of paint on our house.

The last coat was a layer of latex, applied rather sparingly in spots, and laid on with a trowel in others. I am not at all impressed with the way the house was painted last.

Before that, there was a layer of bright, minty green paint that makes you blink and rub your eyes when you first see it, maybe even shield them from the glare. It's the kind of color that makes you rack your brain for diplomatic ways to describe it, such as, "My, that certainly is eye-catching, isn't it?"

Under the green there's one, maybe two layers of white. These, along with the green, are certainly lead-based. Although we're wearing face masks now, we have almost certainly sucked in toxic amounts of it already. Just by power sanding the north wall of the house I'm sure I've exposed everyone in the neighborhood to ten times the federally set limit.

Lastly, there's another mint-green layer of paint right up against the cedar siding. Either somebody had a great big happy feeling for mint green, or that first coat was a primer and never meant to be seen by anyone for more than a day or two.

And now we've got to strip every layer off. *sigh*

A Stiff Belt

This is how I spent my Sunday. How about you?

One of the problems we've been having with scraping the paint is knowing how much to scrape off. Some of it is bubbling away from the siding, some of it peels away from the bubbles if we keep picking at it, and some of it is stuck fast to the panels.

So we went to ask the guys at the paint stores, and, unluckily for us, they all said the same thing: If we can scrape it off, then it should be scraped off. Damn. I was sort of hoping for a more casual, "Awww, leave it alone" answer.

Back at the ranch I set to work with a scraper again and, after twenty minutes of picking at it and getting just about nowhere, I grabbed a belt sander, loaded it with a 50-grit belt that I bought at the hardware store while we were out asking stupid questions, and started grinding away.

The difference between trying to sand the paint off the house with a 50-grit and the 80-grit belt I used last time was awesome. 50-grit just tore the paint off. Tore into the siding if I leaned too hard on it, too. There's definitely an art to using it.

The head-to-toe coverage is supposed to protect me from inhaling the lead-based paint that is almost certainly under the latex. I feel okay so it must have worked at least a little bit.

Back to work!

Sort of looks as though I knew what I was doing, doesn't it? In fact, this is a textbook example of looks being deceiving. If I'd had any idea what I was doing, the vent would be flush with the soffit and I wouldn't have been forced to cover the hole I cut in the wrong place with a piece of plywood.

There's a thick wooden joist just to the right of the vent, and another one to the left. I cut a neat, round hole right under the wooden joist, where it would be impossible for the plastic housing of the vent to stick up into the attic, much less to allow room for me to connect the exhaust hose to the vent.

So I cut the piece of plywood and mounted the vent in it, figuring on cutting an oblong opening into the soffit. The plywood would cover the irregular hole, I figured, and it did, but my next problem was that, after opening the hole in the soffit, I found that the angle of the joist left a triangular hole an inch and a half wide through which I could barely see the exhaust hose.

Insert a lot of cussing here.

At first it didn't seem possible that I could pull an exhaust hose four inches wide through the triangular gap, but my frustration had reached the point where I could have pulled a bowling ball through that gap. The hose was a thin plastic membrane over a wire coil, nothing like a bowling ball. It turned out to be flexible enough that I managed to sneak it through by shoving my hand into the dank, mildew-clogged hose to get ahold of it, and inch it, bit by laborious bit, through the gap. After ten minutes or so of that I ended up with a neck just long enough to connect to the vent.

The rest went more or less smoothly. I took My Darling B around to the front of the house to show her my handiwork and fed her the "looks are deceiving" line.

"I sort of figured the plywood was covering up an oops," she said, so maybe it doesn't look quite as much like I knew what I was doing as I'd like it to.

We pause for this brief announcement ...

We got a break in the weather tonight, by which I mean that it rained, so we stayed in, ordered a pizza and drank beer, a fine reward after five days of dutifully scraping paint off the house, if you ask me, not that you did.

Water pistol set to kill

My Darling B came to my basement lair a night or two ago to tell me that every web site she googled said that we should power wash first, scrape after.

Well. Too late for the north wall of the house, then. Have to write that one off.

But not for the front and the back. I did the back first, then swung around to the front. There was just enough light left for this photo shoot.

The power washer is not all it's cracked up to be, frankly. I guess I imagined a laser-sharp blast of water so powerful that dirt, cobwebs, mildew and wasp nests would be instantly swept away as the beam passed anywhere nearby.

But it's not all that much stronger than a wide-open garden hose with a good pistol-grip nozzle. For all the fussing I had to do dragging out an electrical cord, plugging it in and connecting it to a hose, I have to say the bother's just not worth it. A hose would've done just as good a job. A hose and a stiff brush, even better. Not that I was even thinking of using a brush.

More of the same ...

Still scraping away old paint and not sure if it's going to end soon. Every time I allow myself to truly believe we might be nearing the end, my eye falls on a bubble of paint so obvious that I wonder how I missed it, and upon picking it open I end up peeling away a patch of bad paint bigger than my butt.

So I spend this evening standing before the wall, letting my eye wander idly over the patchy paint, until I found a bubble. I'd scraped that until there was nothing left to scrap there, then I'd climb down from the ladder and stand before the wall, letting my eye wander again.

At about eight, our neighbor came home and suggested we could call it quits, or she could switch on her porch light so we could work until bed time. I knocked off. B followed me in ten minutes after.

Tools of the Trade

My Darling B is showing off the many gadgets we've collected over the past three days to scrape and peel the old paint off Our Humble O'Bode.

On your left, the standard scraper. B seems to like this a lot. I don't think it's all that hot, but it has its uses. Mostly, it's very wide, so it can peel a lot of paint off in one go, if the paint's ready to peel off.

On your right, on top, the push-pull scraper. Razor sharp and able to rip paint off the wall, you can apply it at almost any angle to get the blade under the edge of the paint. Looks pretty scary, too, like something your CIA interrogator would bring to Gitmo after your one-on-one chats had progressed to the point where waterboarding wasn't getting you to talk about Osama's hidden base.

On your right, top, the gouging tool. You're not supposed to gouge, but we're at least twenty-four hours past the point of removing paint gently. I wanted this tool especially to rip open the painted-over vents under the paneling in the hopes that the coat of paint we apply won't bubble. It's pretty handy for scraping the gobs of paint out of the corners, too.

And on the left, bottom, so small you can barely see it, a pair of tweezers. Only B uses these. I'm not nearly as meticulous as she is.

Tools of the Trade, Ninja Version

Of course, everything looks better as an action shot.

Scraping By, Day Two

The good news: I finally bought a belt sander. I love gadgets as much as the next guy, maybe more, and there have been more than a few projects around here that I might have finished more easily if I'd had a belt sander close to hand.

The bad news: It doesn't remove house paint as well as I thought it would. It does the job all right, but I had imagined it would quickly strip it off with one or two passes. No joy there. With an 80 grit belt (and I'm pretty sure that would be rough enough to grind off most of my thumb if I forgot to unplug the sander before changing the belt) I had to lean into it pretty hard to tear off the heavy latex layer on top. The next layer, probably an older oil-based paint, was flaky enough that it came away pretty easily, but not so easily I'd want to depend on using the sander to remove all the paint.

Scraping By, Day Two

My Darling B takes scraper in hand for the second day of prepping the house for painting.

Scraping By, Day Two

Does it look like we're making any progress at all? It's getting hard for me to tell.

We've been at it today since about ten or ten thirty. I knocked off at five when I noticed I was getting so punchy that I was gouging more than scraping. My Darling B had the stamina and determination to continue until quarter to six.

I think we've got most of the bubbles popped and the loose paint peeled away. B wants to take another pass at it tomorrow after work to make sure all the rough spots are smoothed out and there aren't any flapping dogears we missed.

Scraping by ...

... then My Darling B stepped in to help, and we got this much done by five o'clock

Scraping by ...

The first order of business was to scrape off the paint that was bubbling and peeling away from the siding.

I was able to get about this far working on my own from ten until lunch.

You're painting your WHAT?

The house is shedding! And I don't want a shed!

We invited a couple different painters to give us estimates of what it would cost to paint the house. Have you ever done that? Don't do that. It's far too scary.

So we figured we might be able to do it ourselves and save a couple thousand dollars. I don't know what makes us think that. We don't know a thing about painting a house and we have no idea what supplies cost, but we're pretty sure down deep in our gut. How could that be wrong?