Outdoor Painting Season 2015 has Begun

Last summer I did a commando paint project, the front of my garage, just to not have to look at mauve paint out my kitchen window. This spring it was good to drag out my garden stuff, and hang my green man. 

I also posted a similar photo to this one below, letting you know that it was very illusory, with more mauve paint just around the corner: 

(And weeds. And random rocks. And some scraps of rabbit fencing.)

I do intend to make progress on the house as well, but as my inaugural project, while I'm finishing up some indoor projects, I decided to do the north garage wall. It'll be a relatively easy incremental project while I'm juggling several different things (though this begs the question: When am I not?)

Here's a before:

That entry door? It's a hollow-core interior grade closet door. What's left of it. It has literally rotted straight off the hinges. I have no idea why the previous owners chose to install this. I have it nailed into the door frame to keep it up, and so it's non-functional at the moment. The light fixture is nailed into the siding rather than screwed. It's wiring is a mystery. I'm not sure whether it's wired to a switch in the kitchen near the sliding patio door (possible), or to the switch near the door on the inside of the garage (which also turns on an overhead light in the garage).

Here's how it looked after about 3 hours of scraping:

The mauve paint went over both bare wood and the remainder of that yellow paint without any primer. So it's very unstable. In some areas it peels off in big strips, in other areas you really have to put your back into the scraping. I'll be using the peel-bond primer on this side of the garage too, so I hope we'll have a good solid paint surface to paint when I'm done with all my prep.

We'll see how much we get done before November 1!