Painting won out today. We went shopping this morning at a sporting goods store and I bought some shin guards so the bruises on my legs wouldn’t be a problem painting. If only we had thought of that before painting both Friday and Saturday 🙂
So the second coat of green is on! And it looks great, now we just have to do the trim in yellow two coats and we’ll have one section done!
Green done!
After cleaning up it was threatening rain (luckily it held off an hour and was more haze than rain). So we decided to relax the rest of the day. I made up a roast for dinner and baked some apple pies. Then we settled in for some episodes of Bones 🙂
pie time!
Back to work tomorrow, not sure what my work schedule looks like but we still have windows and trim to paint. The projects never end!
After a light sanding to remove the bugs I had the side of the house ready to go today.
Siding and trim primed
After a short trip to the dump and the paint store (out of primer after a day of priming), I got to painting.
Painting away - the house is green!
While I painted, Ryan worked on the window panels, he started by putting in the window sill replacements so the sill goes all the way around the cupola.
Sill pieces in
And finally – about 3:30 the side of the house was painted green!
Coat one finished!
The trim will be yellow (the color of the windows) with some red accents (the moldings) when it’s finally done. For now it’s got one coat and I just need another nice day to get the second coat on so i can start the trim!
After painting I helped out on the window panels. We managed to get the first window box on the left side all framed out. It goes really really slowly with all the angles but it’s looking good.
finishing up for the night with some wood filler.
I didn’t get a good picture of how far we got but i’ll grab one tomorrow.
And tomorrow it looks to be cooler (70) but no rain still so maybe i can get that second coat of green on! If i get it on early enough I can then do some trim painting after it dries – that would be great.
My other project for tomorrow is to continue working on the porch decking. We have to jack up and put some supports under the part that’s left because it’s sagging in the middle, then just lay down the rest of the decking.
Not sure yet which project will win for sure, I really should do the painting but my legs are very bruised from the ladder already – we’ll see if I can manage it!
My original plan was to take all Fridays off in September to work on painting the house – well it’s the last friday in september and I finally took a day to paint (I did take last friday off but it rained).
So today I started by sanding the side of the house that I caulked last weekend. This took probably 5 hours.
All sanded and swept clean.
Then I proceeded to prime everything (siding and trim). This also took about 5 hours which had me finishing about 8pm which is well after dark (had some lights set up). I wouldn’t have painted in the dark but primer I wasn’t worried about and it takes longer to dry than latex paint. I’d really like to paint tomorrow but first i’ll have to sand the areas that have bugs stuck to them from the lights 🙂
All in all I’m pretty happy with the days’ progress. I’m sore and tired now however so I’m going to watch the new Bones and get some sleep!
I finally had a night where I could work on Emily’s quilt and get the top finished up! I got the border on last night, then used a spray baster to put it together. We’ll see how the spray baster works out for such a large quilt but it will make it easier to machine quilt if that’s the route I go.
I’m going to try machine quilting it but if that doesn’t work out i can always hand quilt it and make it her Christmas gift instead of bday gift. I’m not even positive I can finish it for her birthday even if I machine quilt it. I’ve never done one this large before!
Anyway – here’s apicutre of the quilt just after i “basted” it!
Emily's quilt
The back of the quilt is 2 panels of fabric, one red and one yellow.
This 3 day weekend (for me) did not go exactly as planned. First off I hadn’t been feeling well all week and not taking it easy definitely took its toll on me. Secondly Ryan unexpectedly had to work all weekend. Thirdly – it rained on Friday – a lot!
So let’s see – Friday it rained so there was definitely no painting going on or prep work for painting. I did some shopping and relaxed mostly. When Ryan got home from his leadership retreat we watched some movies since he would be working all weekend.
Saturday it had dried up so I got started on the prep work for painting. I caulked all around the windows and siding of the area we did last year (left side of the house). Unfortunately the caulk I started with takes 7 days to dry before I can sand and paint… oops. When I ran out of caulk I bought a quicker drying caulk but I had already done more than half of the area with the slow dry stuff. So that ruled out painting on Sunday. I did however start sanding under the porch and we decided to just heat gun the paint off the area that we didn’t replace. The sanding was not coming out to my desired smoothness and we tried an orbital sander, a belt sander and a grinder with a sanding pad. The last one was too hard to control and is definitely getting returned.
Caulking finished. Next up a quick sand.
Finally came Sunday – we started by installing our new antenna up on the porch roof and connecting it to the patch panel in the basement. Then Ryan began working and I decided it was a good day to work on the deck. I got 16 boards in by myself, then sanded the 2 sections (from last time and this time), and finally stained them before it rains this week. I’m very excited, I think if we have one more day to work on the deck we can finish the section that’s currently demolished. Almost half way around the wrap around porch!
Porch progress
– quick side note – these pictures were taken in near DARK. My camera is pretty cool and will automatically leave the shutter open longer if it’s dark out (I keep the flash off at all times) so as long as I hold the camera steady I get decent evening shots! This works great since we work on the house until it’s dark.
Another porch view
I ended the day by cleaning, I vacuumed up the porch area (the sanding yesterday and today made a dusty mess) and then I vacuumed the whole house because the little spiders were really getting to me. Now the house is decently clean and I can relax with my book.
It doesn’t look much different at this point but it definitely is! Last night I finished piecing all 56 blocks together so it’s a single quilt top now!
All pieced together
Now i just need to cut and add borders, quilt it and bind it – yea “JUST” – oh boy! But I love the colors in this quilt and this pattern really went together quickly. It took maybe 2 hours or so to get all the blocks together, spread out over 2 nights.
I’m a little worried about the quilting part of this, it’s such a large quilt – never done one this large – it’s going to be hard to quilt!
Waking up late again left us with only 2 hours to work before the football game started so we decided to do decking today since I could continue that by myself after the game started and after the game we could continue together.
So we got a decent amount of the deck down today and I got all the screw/nail holes filled in the window panels we did yesterday.
Got a decent amount put down today.An end in sight!Holes filled - ready to be sanded and primed
I didn’t JUST work on the house today, I got a big batch of mac n’ cheese made today and frozen into 2 portion dishes. I also made some sauce for dinner using the garden tomatoes (and a can of crushed tomatoes since we didn’t have THAT many) 🙂
Now we’re settling down to some dinner and then I’ll relax for the night!
We had a bit of a late night last night visiting with family so we had to make up for some sleep this morning 🙂 Once we got going however we started right in on the second copper triangle. Moving the metal bender outside made it go MUCH faster (instead of carrying the copper inside for every bend).
Copper finished on the bottom!
After copper we did some caulking and started on the bottom piece of the window panels which were by far the hardest pieces to get in because of the copper. We went with screws so we could pull them in straight a bit. After the first one was cut however we realized we needed a third piece of wood for the front one so we made a quick trip over to the lumber yard.
First piece of window panels in!
After our lunch break/lumber yard trip it was back to the window panels. I don’t remember how long it took us but we finally got the bottom row all in.
Even though we were fighting daylight by the end we continued on until just about dark, getting as much in as we could. The angles are troublesome, not because they are angles (22.5 degree cuts) but because the tar paper is uneven and bunches up making it hard to get the pieces to fit together nicely and hard to find the corner at all. We’re using expanding glue in most seams so hopefully once it’s painted it will be hard to see the seams at all.
The first box framed outThe second box framedThe stopping point for the night
Of course that was just the stopping point for outdoor work since it was dark by the time we picked up the tools. We then put together our new UHF antenna and temporarily installed it on the porch (which gets a decent amount of channels)! I also hooked up our patch panel to 3 of our coax outlets and we have our internet running off of one of our “new” outlets as well as a direct line from the cable to the tv which pulls in a few channels.
So we went from no tv at all to some HD channels over the antenna – just in time for Sunday football and the antenna cost was cheaper than 2 months of cable!
Well I got the second coat of urethane on the front door sidelight finally! One more coat to go but at least it’s pretty protected with 2 coats. I had to get it done pretty early so I could leave the door open while it dries which takes a few hours.
Sidelight with 2 coats of urethane
Then I got some blueberry muffins baked and some cherries pitted (to be frozen for shakes). Not a bad day off so far. Time for some quick chores and maybe I’ll get an hour to relax or so before Ryan gets home.
