Almost done

I spent the entire weekend praying for no rain while doing prep work, and then painting the project house. If the president is a decider, then I'm a doer. I don't like prep work; I enjoy the feeling of accomplishment when I can see real change.

For the task of painting this house, I have the proper tools--a pressure washer and an airless paint sprayer. Even with the right tools, though, I had several challenges this weekend. The first challenge was what to do with fascia that was being destroyed by carpenter bees. They're really bad this year, at least at this house. I decided to take the gutters down and remove the damaged fascia rather than plug the holes to repair the damage. It took trips to two Home Depots, but I finally located Harditrim fiber cement planks that are designed for use as fascia. I'm really happy with the James Hardie siding I installed, and carpenter bees won't stand a chance against fiber cement.

As I removed the fascia, I noticed that some of the gutters had rust spots on the bottom, and upon further inspection, I realized that these were galvonized metal gutters rather than aluminum. This sucks--galvonized metal eventually rusts, which is why it's not often used today as material for gutters. An inspection of all of the gutters revealed several that need to be replaced because they've actually rusted through. Replacing the fascia and gutters will be a project for another weekend, however, as the cement planks are heavy and gutters are simply a two-person job.

As I was painting, another challenge was that the hose from my airless paint sprayer to my spray gun was about 4 feet too short to reach the top of the house. I bought a 30" extension for the tip of my spray gun, but even that wasn't long enough. My first solution was to elevate the sprayer and paint by making my own scaffolding between two ladders as you can see in the picture above. After a paint accident taking the sprayer and 5 gallon bucket of paint down, though, I got wise when it came time to paint the other side of the house. There I moved the sprayer inside the house and ran the hose out the window.

It did rain a couple of times on Sunday, but never for more than 15 minutes. I'm bruised (mostly from catching an extension ladder in the chest), battered, sore, and I feel like I'm coming down with a cold. But I was able to get the house painted... well, mostly. In my state of exhaustion, I neglected to notice I hadn't painted the upper section as you can see in the photo. I'll get to that soon along with painting the trim.

And my belief that this was a wise investment was partially validated today. The neighborhood where this home is located feeds into Walton High School, which was the 2nd Georgia school listed in Newsweek's Top 1,000 U.S. High Schools, coming in at #181.