Staying on task!

This past weekend was scheduled to remove the siding, scrape the original wood siding and paint the exterior of the house. Amazingly we accomplished all that in 2 days!

Dan started Fri night stripping the siding, while I was out driving Thomas around and meeting some friends for dinner. What a great guy he is!

By Saturday afternoon all the siding was off the house (thanks to the help of Dan’s dad, Daniel and Thomas.) Next step scraping! I actually like scraping, the last time I scraped the garage it was 100 degrees outside, much nicer at 60 degrees.

There were some repair patches we discovered. This double window must have been a taller window the same as what is in the living room. No worries though, we plan on adding French doors here when we redo the kitchen.

The other smaller window is in the kitchen area, I do want to add more windows to the kitchen but I don’t think that is the right spot, we’ll just have to see.

That dark line down the side of the house is where the addition was added on. It seems they didn’t connect it to the original house at all, just butted it up to it. So we have quite the gap that needs to be filled in.

We were all commenting on how ugly the original pink trim was, when it occurred to me that it was almost the same color as what I painted the inside trim. Hmm seems a little spooky.

After we finished the scraping Dan was panicking a bit, the house was really dirty and needed to be cleaned before we could paint. He didn’t think we could use the power washer since there are so many holes in the wood siding. In the end he decided he had to power wash. I stood inside the house trying to cover up any water that was spraying through. The water sprayed in some places and seeped in many more. It looked like the house was bleeding.

This is blurry because I didn’t want to use a flash, but each of those little white spots is actually one of the nail holes left behind from the siding, this is just a small section of the wall, and this is what the water was seeping in through. All these holes have to be caulked before we can put up insulation.

We also had to deal with a few big holes in the front of the house. Apparently, when they sided they removed the transom but didn’t feel the need to fill it in with anything, same for the mail slot. Thomas hurriedly covered both with plastic before Dan power washed the front.

Speaking of Thomas, he had a side job going on in the midst of the chaos. He was repairing our old cedar (trash picked) bench. Here he is using the plate joiner to cut biscuit holes.

And here is the house finally painted. We rented a sprayer and bought 3, 5 gallon buckets of paint (sprayer was $80 for 24 hours and paint was almost $600.) Dan started spraying about noon on Sunday and was done with 2 coats, the front of the garage and some furniture by 4:30.

I should have taken a picture of our neighbors house during the painting, we enshrouded it in plastic to prevent any over spray. Of course the wind kept blowing into the plastic poofing it out like a sail. It was challenging to say the least. But we succeeded at not getting much paint on the their house. (I did see one little spot, that I meant to go wash off.)

Back entry way

back porch (it was already painted white but it got a fresh coat along with the underside of the roof.)

the garage

and some benches…

And here it is all cleaned up and painted! Next weekend the new windows go in along with all the trim! I can’t wait.