Just One More...

Today, I worked on the exterior of the boys' bedroom window. All. Day. Long. Just when I thought I had mastered the approach for these things, I discovered there are *many* ways of "fixin' up yer windah". Help me. Although I got an earlier start today, I did not get to the point of priming. That felt like such a defeat. I know it wasn't, but it felt that way.

I spent most of the day trying to disentangle the mass of caulk and paint from the mortar without bringing the whole house down on my head. Mostly, this involved using small metal objects (I went through quite a few utility blades) and my thumbs to create enough leverage to remove the caulking. It hurt. A lot. (On this window, they didn't smear the caulk too much, which was thoughtful. They painted over the caulk and all the way onto the brick with many layers of paint... which was, for whatever their intent, probably just the ticket.) Whatever works, I guess. I'll be more gracious when my thumbs stop bleeding.

Zorak, meanwhile, was able to reap the benefits of the weeks and weeks of prep work he's put in by putting the stain on the gable ends of the front of the house. It's dark, very dark. The can says "oak", but it's a burgundy color. Wow. It's pretty dramatic. It also makes the new porch look a little peekidy. (What is the real way to spell that? I went with phonetic. That's all I had.) He tore down a couple of things that didn't look "right", and got them fixed. They do look much better. I'll point them out when I have better closeups.

Anyway, I tried to find a before-before picture, without the porch frame on it, but of the thousands of photos we've taken since we moved here, there are almost none that show the house in the distance, let alone the eaves, awnings, etc. Gotta love that zoom lens! I'll blog about the building of the porch later.

Everything to the right of the porch (about the middle of that first batch of windows) is too high for us to reach, even with our expando-ladder, so it's not done yet. That's going to have to wait just a little longer. On the bright side, we are pleasantly surprised to note how incredibly difficult it is to access most of the windows on the house. Er, it will be pleasant when it's no longer we who are trying to access them...

And so, this concludes the latest rash of posting on the renovation of the Forever Home (aka - This Old Shack). :-) Thanks for sharing this particularly wild adventure with us. I'm off to switch out the bandages on my thumbs.

Kiss those babies!
~Dy