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.

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*

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 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 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.