A Little Coat of Paint

August 2013

I am going to jump back in time to show you a quick update we made last summer. At the same time that we took on the our cinder block wall of death we also decided to paint our garage.   
 

 

I would like to take a moment to show you the before picture. The wonderful color scheme of baby blue and white, the decision to paint the beveled siding two toned.... the ghetto lean-to shed. It is a true masterpiece. Moving on, we took advantage of our friend contractor and had them paint the South and East facades.  They provided the labor and painting supplies and we supplied the actual paint. We already had left over paint for most of the project and only had to buy a gallon of white exterior paint and a gallon of primer.

 

The contractor power washed and scrapped our side wall and the front of the garage. Our neighbor had asked that we paint the front of the garage the same gray color as her house. We agreed it would be more cohesive for the entire facade to be painted one color.  We both felt our dark blue was a little too bold for the building.  We also matched her white trim color. To call out our side on the front we decided to paint the garage doors with our house's red color. She paid us for 1/3 of the cost to do the work and provided the gray paint.  Her portion helped off set the cost of the paint.  So in the end, the work cost us nothing. WIN.

 On the south side of the garage that can be seen only from our yard we decided to go all white and paint the small window the same red as our house doors and windows.

Note, the weirdly placed thermometer on the lean to wall, this is because it is hiding a hole in the plywood wall. Classy.

  

What a difference a coat of paint makes.  It's still a pretty ramshackle structure, but we have made the best of it without breaking our budget.  Long term I would love to restore these doors to their former glory.

Red Paint... Will Be the Death of Us

June 2013

Now that the porch was painted and stained we could start making the screens for the openings. After several brainstorms we decided to make these ourselves. The work needed to create 'standard' sized openings to utilize prebuilt screens was almost the same. Building our own screens would give a more custom look while using store bought would look more builder grade.  Step one: what to build the screens out of?  We ruled out cedar due to cost and MDF out of crappiness, which left us with pine trim pieces. These would work well because we wanted the screens to be removeable, light, and attractive.

We found our pine trim stock at Lowes. It was 1" wide and 1/4" thick. One edge was bull nosed which we liked. It made them less boring and standard looking. They came pre-primed and I always like when a step has been removed for us. The biggest issue was how much of the material we needed. The pieces came in 8' lengths and as we started tabulating the number of sticks grew. Our plan was to build two frames for each opening. We would staple the screening to one side and then nail the frames together to make a complete screen. So each opening x 2. In addition to the screens, we needed to purchase trim to create frames inside the porch bays to allow the screens to rest in the openings. We decided the same trim for the screens would work pretty well. Before the math made our heads explode we decided to get 30 sticks. At roughly $8 a piece, it brought us to $240 in wood. We also had to buy screen material $116 for a roll (we chose black aluminum, which was more expensive but more durable), brad nails, staples, screen clips, black screws, and paint. I talked the Lowes lady into giving us contractor pricing (since we bought so much) and we gulped and moved forward.

Since it was June in Oregon, it rained the entire month, so I set up shop in the basement to paint the trim red. I am not sure when we decided to make the frames red. By this I mean, that I decided they should be red. Very quickly I grew to regret this decision. As I already knew, our red (Benjamin Moore Raisin Torte) requires 2-3 coats to cover. This was even worse since the pieces were painted with white primer and it was slow going painting the 1" pieces without drips or brush marks. I spent hours in the basement half bent over painting the sticks on saw horses. It took about 2 hours to coat all the pieces on one side, wait to dry 4-6 hours, paint again, then flip and paint the backside (I cheated and did one coat on the back). This is the point where I should have sucked it up and purchased a paint spray gun and the job would have taken half the time.

As soon as the trim pieces were complete, I remembered that our porch doors would also need to be red. So four doors came off their hinges, down in the basement and onto my trusty saw horses. These required primer, and two coats of red on each side. It was a lone women show and it was not fun. We rehung the red doors once we stained the porch.  After all this effort, we were still miles away from being completed and we needed two full weekends to complete the rest.

Exterior Paint is Here!

June 2011

The cool thing about painting is that it happens and it happens fast.  Our contractor was spraying the body of the house and so one day we left for work..... and that night we came home and our house was blue! It was super exciting and the difference was immediate!

The following day they came back to start to paint the main trim color the yellow we had selected.  Holy yellow! The problem is something that looks very pale on the small mock up, looked extremely bright and glaring once it goes up.  I came home from work and gulped. I actually kinda regret that we never took a picture because our house looked like a sports jersey (in a somewhat cool way).  As soon as Josh came home I told him we had to go get another color!  We went out to Sherwin Williams at 6:00pm and went to the white section and then picked the yellowest white we could find.  The color was called Tea Light and was about 4 shades lighter then the original color.  The next day our painters got two new gallons and started covering up our little issue.  This color was perfect, it looked like buttercream.  It still read yellow but definitely not in a primary kid school kind of way.  We did keep the porch ceiling the darker yellow as a testament and also because it looked great up there without sunlight.

The delicate nature of painting all the window sashes took some additional time so it took about a week to get the overall color scheme.  To save money I painted the front door and the french doors since doors take a lot of time and detail work.  In the end, we couldn't have been happier with our (almost original) picks.

Our little project was slowly wrapping up!