by Nathan Stout (of AccordingToWhim.com)
This is an ongoing set of blogs about the work I have been doing this summer on my house (not the rent house as outlined in the ‘On having renters’ series of blogs.
Now that Daylight Savings is heading to a close (or is it open?) my time outside will soon be VERY limited. Several months back when I was doing all that work caulking and painting the house I was able to work until nearly 8:30. Soon I will have until about 5:45. This will mean I will have about 15 minutes to work outside once I get home from work during the week. That really sucks. By the time this posts time will have already switched over and I will be inside the house in the evenings, not getting stuff done outside.
Over the last couple of weeks I have been touching up the paint on the house. There are a lot of places were I might have glopped over onto good paint and I need to cover that up or just touch up places I somehow missed. There is still a majority of porch railings (front and back) that are not done. This is because it is tedious and a lot of that wood is rotted and I really just need to replace those pieces. The carport’s supports also need to be painted but only I seem to notice so there is no big rush.
Last week (or so) I started working on rebuilding the trellis outside the front of the house. If you remember I pulled the old one down because it was rotted and I needed to get at the certain spots to paint. This left the front of the house looking very plain and both me and the wife wanted it to look good again. I bought a large amount of lumber when all this started including the parts for the trellis (and shed door) but alot of that wood sat around too long and warped. I took my father in law’s advice and laid out the wood and screwed it to the deck and let it get wet and then dry out. That fixed most of it and I was able to continue. I did wind up buying more 4×4’s for the front trellis pillars. I spent about a week getting the old holes dug back out and the new 4×4 in place and secured with the cross planks. Next I will concrete the 4x4s in and cut the excess off the top (with a saws-all) and then paint it green. I will also concrete in the fence posts I pulled up in April when we got the drainage work done.
This leaves me with more touch up painting and some general fix up issues and that all for the summer of work and shitty contractors!