House Painting Journal
Since I live where I grew up, I’m living with all the shortcuts I took as a kid when I was forced labor to paint the house for my parents. The quality of painting on the facia boards is no exception to this rule. The last time I painted the peaks where the facia board is located, was in about 1996 and man, what a slip-shod job I did! I don’t remember if I did much scraping or sanding then - I don’t find much evidence for good prep work in any case. As I scrape away the flaking slate blue paint, it is only in the rare case that I find any remnant of the ugly green of my childhood, or any kind of suggestion of a primer coat. In fact, the boards I attacked yesterday were pretty much bare wood. Most of the house is covered in grey cedar shakes, but there are three "peaks" where I have 7 tiers of 10" facia boards that have always been a pain to paint since the position of bushes and a chain link fence are at just the wrong location to make placement of the ladder difficult. Although the maintenance on the wood is a pain, I like the look of wood better than vinyl. On the west end of the house, the boards are in the shade a lot. Despite the shady location, the boards aren’t rotted as far as I can tell. They don’t seem to be soft wood and appear to have many more years left in them. That’s good since it seems to be taking me years to get the job done.
I spent several weekends last spring scraping, sanding, cleaning with water and bleach, sanding again, and priming (I’m going to be painting the boards white, so I’m using white primer). I managed to get the entire north facing peak and trim prepared, but never got to painting! This means that the front of the house looks like it has a bad case of exzema. Luckily the front yard is treed pretty heavily, so you can’t really tell from the road - at least thats what I tell myself. I hope to be able to finish up the west facing peak quickly as the paint there has held up a lot better. The only real problem has been finding the time to do it.
Once the facia boards and trim are taken care of its back to the shakes!
Comment posted on 7-4-2004
which reminds me of a joke…
There was a tradesman, a painter called Harry, who was very interested in
making a penny where he could, so he often would thin down paint to
make it go a wee bit further.
As it happened, he got away with this for some time, but eventually a
church decided to do a big restoration job on the painting of one of their
biggest churches.
Harry put in a bid and, because his price was so low, he got the job.
And so he set to erecting the trestles and setting up the planks, and buying
the paint and, yes, I am sorry to say, thinning it down with the turpentine.
Well, Harry was up on the scaffolding, painting away, the job nearly
completed, when suddenly there was a horrendous clap of thunder, and the
sky opened, the rain poured down, washing the thinned paint from all over
the church and knocking Harry clear off the scaffold to land on the lawn,
among the gravestones, surrounded by telltale puddles of the thinned and
useless paint.
Harry was no fool. He knew this was a judgment from the Almighty, so he
got on his knees and cried: "Oh God! Forgive me! What should I do?" And
from the thunder, a mighty voice spoke…
"Repaint! Repaint! And thin no more!"
Comment posted on 9-26-2004
Painting has not been a priority this summer, I’m sad to say. This weekend
here and there. I’m not done in the front, I still have to do
I finally got around to actually painting the front peak (white). I had to
clean it again with bleach even though I had done a ton of prep scraping and
priming in July since there was mold growing like the skin of a Trill (Star
Trek reference
the trim, but getting that peak done was a huge hurdle (if only
psychological!). Maybe now since its gotten cooler outside, I’ll be more
willing to work toward getting this project done before the winter.
Comment posted on 11-21-2004
Having the kitchen redone necessitated the painting of the dining room
cieling as well as the kitchen. For the first time in probably 20 years you
can look up in the dining room without fear of peeling paint hitting you in
the eye! Cathy wouldn’t let me just paint the kitchen white (I have never
painted the inside of this house anything else), but it came out really nice
with blueish-grey walls (cieling is still white). There are all sorts of little
spots where I missed which I didn’t see until I was all cleaned up of course,
but that leaves some of the fun for another day. I still have staining to do
on the window and door moldings, but that can wait, right?
Comment posted on 7-23-2005
Scraped, sanded, wood filled holes, washed down with bleach and
primed the front trim. Now I’ve got to finish tommorow by painting it,
but it already looks 100% better.