Over the last couple of weeks we've been working on the first big summer house project. Painting the trim on the exterior of the house. Well, it is finally done. A full gallon of paint, two worn out brushes, and numerous heart stopping moments with ladders, (as I told a friend "No I'm not afraid of falling, it's the landing that scares me.' ) and it is done. As you can see from the pictures we've dramatically changed the look of the house. Rather than refreshing the trim with a coat of a similar colour we went very different way. Barbara recommended we look at something in the cinnamon / paprika shade and she was right. In person it really brings out the red in the roof and brick in the front. We even had enough to paint the deck. The only really spooky part was when we painted the tall wall; the end at the left of the attached pictures. We borrowed a 20 foot extension ladder from the neighbour and I climbed the wall. We got a slab of concrete from the back yard to make a solid stable base and up the ladder I went. Marsha held the ladder to make sure it wouldn't slip while I scrambled up with a loaded paintbrush. I didn't take the bucket up with me, I wanted a free hand to hold onto the ladder so I ended up climbing up and down, over and over, down to load the brush, up to paint, down to load. I was really tired by the time the end gable was done. Though we masked the trim everywhere else we didn't on the end gable. It was too high, too spooky, and from that far away nobody is going to notice the occasional touch on the shingles or soffit.

As far as the colour is concerned there is a bit of a debate going on. The new colour is fine, it's the old trim colour we are having a disagreement about. Marsha thinks it was a flat, utterly uninteresting battleship grey. I think it was grey but with with the subtlest hint of slate green. Marsha thinks I'm delusional. I thought it might be a good idea to take a chunk of the old trim colour to the Home Depot, have them scan it and tell us if they would put any green in the mix. Marsha ran out and painted the last few pieces of the old trim so we couldn't.  (Actually there were plenty of paint chips that had been scraped from the deck, but Doug said not to bother keeping them.)   Also Barbara said the colour was grey and looked at Doug as if he had two heads when he said it was green.

You decide.

Also notice the beach rocks that Marsha has put around the flower bed. It looks so much better. That was her big all-summer project, bringing the rocks up in 5 gallon pails, four buckets per trip. That was a lot of work.

Maybe it affected her colour perception?

Oh and Marsha did something she has never done before in her life. She picked peaches. Yes we had stopped at a moving sale and the owner said to go ahead and help ourselves to some of their peaches as the tree was just loaded.  We have been enjoying them all week.

D&M