Finally! All the same color!

Today marked an important milestone in our never-ending project to repaint our home: The north wall of the house is all one color. None of the primer paint is visible!

The glare from the afternoon sun doesn't make it very easy to see, but the color we picked out, Cottage Red, is looking very nice now that I don't have to make a frame with my hands to block out the parts of the siding that weren't painted.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.