A Blog Post in Which We Talk About (but don't actually) Paint

Where do you keep your paint brushes when they're not in action? Mine are usually here, on the window ledge above the kitchen sink. Because that's where I clean them. With a house that's constantly got something going on, it's handy, if not really pretty. I can grab them the second I've got a few minutes to party with paint.

But the weather here in the Midwest has been so hellishly rainy that there's been no breaks long enough to get dry enough for the scraping and caulking, let alone the painting.

I posted recently about using a rainy day to paint the screen porch instead of the exterior siding.

That three hours hugely improved a space that majorly frustrated me. So I can't say it was wasted time, even though it felt like it while the raindrops fell.

A little later I managed to start the protected area on the northwest corner of the house, surrounding the patio:

But the weather soon put a stop to that as well. 

It was at about that time my Dad showed up. Regular readers will remember he was the hero of my last summer, and you can read about it here: 

Two weekends ago he came to my house to once again put on his work gloves, pick up a wire brush, and get busy with siding. I have to give him credit for still being willing after last summer, which was brutally hot. That's great dad material, right there. 

The weather, however, had other ideas. Or perhaps I should say it had the same old idea: rain. RAIN. Rain. 

We didn't get a single linear inch of siding scraped. Or a single drop of paint on anything. 

Fortunately (or not so fortunately) there are about 11 billion things on my to-do list here, so we took care of some of those. 

The large spruce tree that is shown in this "before I owned it" photo of the house was having problems when I moved in, and by the time it got through our incredibly harsh winter of 2014, most branches on the bottom half of the tree had no needles except for the very tips, and the situation was getting worse with every passing week. 

Dad helped me get it down in just a few minutes with a chainsaw, and about the only hour of rain-free skies we had that weekend: 

This is the post-clean-up shot, but before I'd had a chance to remove the weeds that had gotten out of control under the tree. Now I need a fully finished and beautiful front foundation landscape bed!

Dad also limbed up the cedar by the patio, fixed my power mower (my new reel mower is doing just fine, but I wanted to have the option of the power mower instead of a piece of non-functional equipment taking up space in my garage.), and removed old aluminum storm windows from the front of my house.

It was a huge help getting other things crossed off my list. I made him a pie. We drank a lot of coffee. We talked for hours. Those things all helped too, just for different, and more important reasons than a big fat to-do list.

I'm going to get back to the painting the first dry spell we have here. I've got the northwest corner waiting for me, as well as where I left off in November:

In the meantime, the windowsill can hold the brushes. That way I know exactly where they are.