Nice weather on my days off has me thinking about scraping some more paint off the house. My goal is to finish up the west wall and the back (north) wall before the end of the year. Let's take a look...
Here's the west wall:
At first glance, not too bad. That one section that's still yellow is the only part of the wall that isn't scraped and painted. That being said, that wall has some really tough paint on it. Really tough. So tough that I tried to put Peel-Away on it last year because I was desperate. (It didn't work as well as you might think.) That's gonna take a while to scrape. Besides the scraping, I need to do three other things: replace a piece of rotted window trim on the laundry room end of the wall; replace some chair rail on the dining room bay where its roof meets its walls; and replace the clapboards over the old basement window. By way of explanation, there's chair rail up under the eaves on the rest of the house and chair rail on the bump-out on the front parlor, so there should be chair rail on the dining room bay, too, but for some reason it's gone. That basement window was removed to run the electrical for the air conditioner into the basement and was patched up with plywood, insulation, and crooked clapboards. I think that's probably where critters are running into the basement, too, so that needs to be fixed for practical reasons as well as pretty ones.
Here's the north wall:
I made a pretty good start on it last year, but there's still a long way to go. Again, there's more there than meets the eye. See all those junky-looking crooked clapboards where the old back door used to be? I'm tearing those off the house. Rather than try to patch new ones back in and forever be discontent with seeing the edges of that patch (I am not a carpenter), I'm going to replace the whole length of clapboards from the edge of the shorter addition over to the back door. That will also eliminate the junky patchwork next to the back door, which used to be a window.
So yes, I do have my work cut out for me. I should be dreading it. I should start lifting weights now to get my noodly arms back in shape. I should be crying myself to sleep just thinking of the hours and hours of work ahead of me. But you know what? I'm not. And here's my crazy confession for the week: I kinda miss scraping paint. I know, I know, it's a horrible job and it takes forever and it makes my arm muscles scream for mercy, but still...I kinda miss it. I miss being bone-tired at the end of the day from physical labor. I miss being able to look back at the end of the day and see visible results of all my work that day. (Even if it's a far smaller patch of bare wood than I'd hoped for.) I miss that seeing the house turn from flaking yellow paint to bare wood to white primer to smooth gray paint. I actually miss all that.
Somebody remind me that I said this come July, okay?
