so tired

So, I’ll admit, I wasn’t really paying attention when Julie said she wanted to get the outside of our house painted over the Christmas holidays. I always want to play video games over the Christmas Holidays, but Julie’s got plans. So I wasn’t really paying attention. It’s been a busy season. We moved into a house. Moved at work. Had 3 Christmases. I had other things on my mind. Until Thursday that is. When in preparation for painting we rented a pressure washer and I washed the house. I was freezing, wet and realizing that we were in way over our heads. I voiced my concerns to Julie, but she noted that I had blasted paint off of large sections of our house and there was no turning back now.

The reason I hesitated is that I severely underestimated the size and architectural complexity of the size of our house. When I look at it I always think of the houses they built in the seventies that are like it. Only the ones they built in the seventies have all the architectural detail simplified, and the size of the house cut by 400 square feet. When I was pressure washing I realized there was a massive amount of trim to paint. It doesn’t look it, but our house has almost as much detailed trim as some sort of New England Gingerbread jobbie. There are beams everywhere. Criss-crossing. Coming out from the house. There are probably over 40 on the front of the house. I am not exaggerating. And these aren’t 1970s, “think about the earth” crossbeams. They’re 4x16s I think. Simply massive. You would have to special order these beams today and they would cost you a fortune.

So I was feeling like we might have a problem. Then we got to home depot and purchased 20 gallons of paint. Which should have been another red flag. It takes us a weekend to paint 3 gallons of paint and we’re going to paint 20?

So I decided that we had to try a paint sprayer. No way we were getting that much paint on there. So I tried the paint sprayer. It worked fantastically for about 5 minutes at which point it started seizing. I went over the directions again and in fine print it was noted that you shouldn’t paint at a greater that 45 degree angle off of center. Which was pretty much everything I had to paint. So I cleaned out the sprayer.

Then I tried it again the next morning. And it seized up. And we bought a 12 foot stepladder. Because I wasn’t going to be able to paint the house on a 16 foot extension ladder. Without dying. And we rented a paint sprayer from Home Depot. Which worked great pointing up at the trim, but applied paint at roughly a gallon per minute. Which was far too much. You squeezed the trigger from five feet away and you had so much paint it was dripping. We called home depot and they couldn’t help me. They seemed to think that was normal. So I had to clean another paint sprayer. And at this point we’ve got about 10 feet of trim painted, and so we just hop to it by hand. And Julie got most of the back finished, and I finished most of one side.

Then yesterday my Dad came over and helped, and we finished about 2/3rds of the front. Yes. 3 people. 2/3rds of one side of a houses’s trim. Trim. Not actual walls. Just trim. Today we finally finished our first coat on all the trim around 3:30. We managed to get a second coat on the trim on the back, and 1/2 of the front (although the easy half of the front, the part that doesn’t require a 12 foot ladder).

So hopefully tomorrow we’re going to get some color at least on the back. And we might cheat and just put a second coat on the parts of the front that will impact us putting color up there.

But good grief, this has been a massive job. We’ve already put on 7 gallons of paint. And we’ve painted the trim. It hurts to rinse the paint out of my hair. It hurts to hoist this beer. We’re hoping that by the time I go back to work we’ll have the front and back done. And we’ll finish the sides this weekend. We hope…

I need to pay better attention.