I knew that scraping the house down to bare wood was going to be a slow and awful job...but I didn't realize how slow and awful. That paint is
tough, y'all. We tried an angle grinder, a heat gun, a disc sander, and White Trash Bob's Metabo thingy and none of them work as well as a pull scraper and a putty knife. Most of them (the grinder, the heat gun, and the sander) didn't work at all. WTB's Metabo works only on perfectly flat trim, not the clapboards. That means hours and hours of chipping away at paint and making not much progress. I was whining about this the other day when Charlie said, "The next time I'm workin on the house and I get an idea, I'm keepin my mouth shut." I asked him what he meant and he said, "This whole thing is my fault. You would've been happy with your little plan about the caulk and then I came along and said we should start all over." It's true, it was his idea, and I recorded that conversation for all eternity
right here. Now I have someone to blame. (Not really; the house will look
so much better when we get done. In three years....)
Anyhow, when Charlie said he'd keep his next big idea to himself, I knew he didn't mean it. So I waited (with my own mouth shut) until the next idea came along. And, I didn't have long to wait. A couple of days ago he was scraping paint off a piece of trim under the eaves when he said, "Ya know, this would be a lot easier if we just took the trim off the house." What?! Take the trim off the house?! That sounded like a huge pain in the hiney to me...but then I got up on the other ladder, started scraping on the trim, and got a crick in my neck in the first five minutes. I went and got a wrecker bar and we took those trim pieces right off the house. (I say that like it was easy--it wasn't. Those things were practically welded to the house by caulk and paint and getting them off the house without breaking them was difficult.)
We started with this:
A quarter-inch of paint in places. Much like the rest of the house. It looks bubbly because I put Jasco stripper (which I highly recommend) on there before I thought to take a picture.
And then it looked like this:
Wow, right?! I think it's actually chair rail.
And then I painted it:
Inside my house, to avoid the heat of the day. There might be a couple pieces of cat fur stuck in the paint. Don't tell Charlie, okay? (The paint is a little darker than this pic in real life.)
And then we put it back on the house, but I didn't get a photo of that because the trim's hidden up under the eaves. Yep, all that work for trim you can't even see unless you stand in the flowerbed and look straight up. The only places on the house where this trim will really show are on the gables, and there I think it will stand out and look really pretty.
I can't wait for Charlie's next idea. I predict it'll happen by the end of stay-cation on Sunday.
