It’s been a few days since I posted an update about the status of my excellent painting adventure that started nearly 10 days ago. Here’s a quick before and after picture of the front of the house which should give a good idea of how we’re doing:

Before painting

The ugliness above the shingles of the overhang in this picture show how high the six layers of shingles we had on our house when we bought it were. Not only was it against code, it was against common sense to have that much weight on top of your house. When we replaced the roof a few years ago, our house literally was creaking for days as it shed thousands of pounds of weight and could once again “breath”.

After painting

The blue eve in the upper middle of the second picture and the gutters still needs to be painted tan, and the frames of the screens (farthest left in the second picture) are being painted to match the burgundy color, but you can get the general idea.

I think we’ll be able to wrap the painting up this weekend, weather permitting. It’s amazing how hard it is to get things done when you only have an hour or two after work to do them instead of the whole day. The slowest part now is the screen frames and window wells. “Taping” is now a four letter word for us.

There is progress being made!

It’s hard to believe, but today is me and Jenny’s sixth wedding anniversary! She’s an amazing woman, a wonderful wife and loving mother.

Traditionally, this is the “iron’ anniversary, but we’ve agreed that this year it will be the “pigment” anniversary.

The painting of the Cody house continues.

After a morning of rain and still no base color applied, I decided to go out and get a new Wagner power spray painter in hopes of catching up on my mission to repaint our house in 10 days.

Despite the warnings of one of my brothers who advocated against the latest in paint application technology, I was able to lay down the base on the entire backside of our house in just under 2 hours. Things were going so well that I almost was late for my first meeting as President of the Park People tonight. Those church bells that chime the hour do in fact provide a public service!

Day five should be one that sees major progress with the new Wagner in hand. By the end of the day tomorrow, I should be able to have 3/4ths of the base done, and can start working on the trim and accent colors by hand.

The one problem that I’m going to run into is the ability to reach the very heights of my house. We live in a 1 1/2 story house, and the very top of the painting spectrum is well above the reach of the very tall 20 foot ladder I have on hand. So for now, I’m focusing on the big picture and will get as much done as possible as fast as possible with the understanding that over the next few days I need to figure out how to sprout wings to reach the spots which a ladder won’t take me. Safely at least.

The Wagner is proving it’s worth and isn’t chewing through as much paint as I had expected, which is a good sign. The one thing I need to be aware of is the fact that I have 25 pounds of paint on my back while being 25 feet up in the air which tends to throw off ones balance to say the least. That combination, at one point, almost led to a quick end to my painting adventure, to put it mildly. On the plus side, I made sure my disability insurance was paid up just in case.

I’ll try to get some pictures up to document the progress tomorrow, as it is taking shape. Thanks for all the suggestions and comments, especially about the carbide paint scraper. It made a big difference!

I’m taking the week off of work to repaint the outside of our house. Money is tight for everyone these days and instead of dropping five large on someone to just do it for me, I decided to dedicate a week of time in the pursuit of “do it yourself”. I mentioned on Twitter yesterday that what started out as scraping the house turned into rebuilding the back door as an example of how when it comes to home repair, it’s never as easy as just sticking to the plan.

Finding rotted wood while scraping for example turned into a “lost” day as I put the scraper down and set out to rebuild the entire back door.

Today I’m happy to report the entire back of our house is prepped for painting and I was actually able to put paint to brush towards the end of the day. Then there’s that doorbell, which I think is brass, so let me get out the thinner and see if I can restore it to it’s original unpainted state. Several hours later, success and I now have one of the most beautiful doorbells on my back door that no one will ever use!

At this rate, I may have at least two sides of my house prepped for painting by Sunday.

It’s satisfying work, putting the elbow grease back into your largest single asset, but it doesn’t leave much time for keeping up on the events of the day. On the plus side, I’m getting one hell of a tan.

So relevant material may only be as available as the length of time I can use a scraping blade before it dulls. The shaving razor racket has nothing on the scraping blade racket I’m quickly discovering.

Again, apologies to regular readers if words like thinner, primer, and hornets nest replace the usual fare on my blog of politics, primaries, and hornets nests that you’re accustomed to.