Back to Painting

We've been working on painting the outside of the house now for several years.  See this post from 2008, and that was even a year or two into the painting. When I first started, I did these color swatches on the back of the house to see what color I liked best. 

We noticed that those swatches are still holding up fairly well, even though there was no prep work done on them at all and the condition of the clapboards was/is pretty horrendous.

Combine that with the fact that we have a 5 - 10 year plan to redo the back of the house - meaning that I don't want to put a whole lot of work into something that's going to be torn down.  So we decided to just do a quick scrape of the loose stuff and paint right over it.  Only missing or totally broken boards were replaced.  Windows & trim were ignored for now.  I certainly didn't bring out the Paint Shaver Pro or the IR heater!

Time is still very limited, so with my snail's pace, I did one wall of the bumpout-bumpout a couple weeks ago, and I did another wall yesterday.

Good enough, I say.  In the past I've talked with my father - he says that I have the ability to know when something is good enough.  His brother still hasn't put siding on his house 25 years later because he can't get something perfect - whatever that "something" is.  Well, it may take me 10 years to finish painting the house, but the back will only be good enough to not annoy the neighbors before it gets torn down.

In other house news, we also got a couple of sections of fence put up.  The fence is mostly functional - so that our 2 big 70 lb doodle dogs can run around while we're out there doing things.  Our next door neighbor, Joyce, took the chain link fence between our front yards down, and we put that one in the back, where all the weird hobbled together chicken wire fencing was.  Then she had her contractor put up a cedar picket for the back half,

and we used him to put up a vinyl picket (we didn't need something ELSE to paint) with a gate going across our driveway,

and a couple of sections in the back that are visible from the front.

We wish we could have had the whole yard done, but we did what we could with our current budget.

You might have noticed in that picture with the gate, that the front of the garage is painted now.  If you have good eyes, you also might have seen that the lights I was drooling over in a previous post are now up!  Those were a gift from Jim.  I love them every time I see them.

And here's a picture of the house as it is now.  Still work to do on the 2nd floor bay and the gables....  Aside from the garage being painted and the fence up, it doesn't look a whole lot different from last year.  But the rose bush is going crazy and looking great again!