Category: Exterior

A great 3 day weekend has begun!  After dropping my cousins off back at their house (they stayed over Friday night) – I came home to Ryan getting the siding started.

The next piece of siding will have to be cut around the window cap that we put on, we’ll do that tomorrow.  After that we’ll put in some temporary pieces that will have to come back out when we do the window panels on the next level of the house.

Unfortunately we lost a half hour of work because our miter saw has a problem with the guard.  We played around with it for about 30 minutes and couldn’t figure out what the problem is so we temporarily took the guard off for the last few cuts.  We definitely need to get that fixed though!

And it looks like the weather is on board with our 3 day weekend to work on the house!  0% chance of rain means we can continue the outside work!  Tomorrow I’ll get a coat of paint on the trim on the other side of the house and we’ll probably work on window panels (after we finish up that siding section).

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!

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 🙂

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.

After a short trip to the dump and the paint store (out of primer after a day of priming), I got to painting.

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.

And finally – about 3:30 the side of the house was painted green!

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.

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.

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!

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).

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.

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.

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!