Turning colors with the season

Not a lot is progressing inside, but the exterior is a whole new house now.

Our neighbor Tony and his crew got started painting during a sudden chilly snap last week. That makes for good house painting, apparently. Temperatures in the 50s with low wind are best for them, and that's exactly what they had.



We actually dipped below freezing two nights, so I pulled in the last of our grape tomatoes and bell peppers. They, um, didn't taste very good this late. Oh well.

The house is sided with T1-11 plywood siding, which has four-inch vertical grooves cut into it and a rough surface. We find it very appealing, but ours had the original paint job on it, we think -- and it was very, very tough work for the crew. In fact, the house soaked up twice as much paint as we estimated it would. However, that's a good thing, because that means the siding is literally saturated with the very high-quality acrylic in Lowe's Valspar Duramax paint.

Because the painting was so much more work than Tony's guys expected, I decided to go ahead myself and rip off all of the shingle siding that used to look gross underneath the windows. Glad I did that, because it was an enormous factor dating the house right back to 1979.

Among the many reasons you don't want shingles on your house: mud daubers love to build nests behind them, as I discovered when pulling them off.



Apparently this kind of wasp isn't aggressive at all towards humans, but I'm still absolutely petrified of them.




All the shingles gone, with the original siding still underneath and continuous. Add in a bottom line of the 2 x 8 cedar and cut off the vertical trim that used to go to the bottom of the wall, and we have a house that looks somewhat timeless.



Bit of a difference, huh? We really can't wait till the porch can be painted (actually stained) white. But we have to wait another five months or so to let the treated lumber dry out sufficiently to hold the stain properly. Doing it too early can make for bad adhesion -- and we want to do things right.






Oh, and the trees and other foliage are gorgeous all around the lake. Hope to be getting back on track inside soon.