"Bless Your Little Bitty Heart"

My heart goes out to the people of Oklahoma.





To donate to disaster relief for the folks in Oklahoma:

Text STORM to 80888 for the Salvation Army
Text REDCROSS to 90999 for the Red Cross
Text FOOD to 32333 for the Regional Food Bank

Each text is a $10 donation.

Not General Sherman

Working on the outside of the house makes me a little bit crazy.  Crazier, I mean.  I get out there where the whole world can see me and I feel like I have to make huge progress every day or I'm a total failure.  Then the haters start showing up to tell me that I can't do this or I shouldn't do that, so to prove them wrong I work even harder.  A little bit of that attitude is good.  A lot of it, and I start to become General Sherman during his March to the Sea.  I develop a scorched earth policy towards anything and anybody who's in my way:  old paint, sleep, talkative neighbors, weather, my friends, nightfall....and what ends up happening is that I miss out on fun things with my friends, I become sleep-deprived and then get sick, and I aggravate my old shoulder injuries.

Well, this year I have decided:  I am not General Sherman.

That means I'll still work hard on the house, but I'm going to spend more time with my friends and family, more time talking to my very cool neighbors, and more time porching.  And I'm not going to feel bad about it.  I tried out the Anti-Sherman Plan for the first time this past week.  My house looked like this on Wednesday morning:

I went to Hilltop Farm & Greenhouse with my mom twice, spent most of a day with her after learning one of her friends had passed away, ate supper with my son and daughter-in-law, talked to my favorite neighbors Floyd and Gwen, cleaned my house, slept until noon every day, planted some flowers, went for walks with White Trash Bob, sat on the front porch or the back patio quite a lot, and had movie night with the furbabies.

And by Friday evening the house looked like this:

Could I have gotten more than that done in three days?  Probably.  But I wouldn't have had as much fun.  I like having fun more than I like finishing up the house in record time.

Besides, nobody in Savannah liked General Sherman anyway.

Worst First

Y'all, I know I said that this year I'd finish painting the west side of the house and then move on to the back and finish all of it, too, or at least as much as I could.

But I changed my mind.

Instead, I think I'll triage my house.  Y'all know what triage is in emergency medicine--the sickest people get treated before anybody else does.  Or, in two words:  worst first.

This is where we left off last year, on the west side of the house.

That big swath of yellow (and bare wood) in the middle is the only unfinished part of the west side of the house.  Why is it unfinished?  Because that paint---will---not---come---off.  The bare wood there took us days and days to finish, with both of us working on it.  We tried.  We tried with the regular pull scraper, a belt sander, White Trash Bob's Metabo paint stripper, an orbital sander, a heat gun, and Peel Away.  The only thing I haven't tried yet is what my bestie Greg jokingly suggested:  a propane torch.  Yeah, not really wanting to burn my house down.

Reluctantly, I have to agree with whoever said, "If it ain't comin' off, it ain't comin' off."  Yup.  That's the truth.  (I distinctly remember having that conversation...I just can't recall who with.)

It doesn't make sense to me to keep chipping away at paint that's stuck tight to the house while in the meantime, paint's literally falling off my house in other places.

Like the back of the house, a little bit...

Worse on the front of the house...

Not so much up there...but looky here by the front door...

And over on the other (west) side of the stained glass windows...

Yikes.  

That's bad enough to get me a warning ticket. "Failure to maintain a historic property" is what they call it.  I really do not want to pay a fine.  Even worse, I really do not want to replace clapboards because they got wood rot.  With all that paint flaking off, that's a possibility.  Water is the enemy of wood; paint and caulk protect it.

And then there's the east side of the house on the "new" (post-1910) addition, which I showed you last time and which, after Wednesday, looks like this:

Believe it or not, that looked even worse than the front of the house.  (Of course I forgot to take good pics before I attacked it with my scraper.)  This part of the house definitely moved to the top of the triage list.  The paint was curled up like dead leaves, some of the clapboards are cracked, and there are small gaps between the clapboards and the trim.  I spent a lot of time out there Wednesday with wood filler, caulk, backer rod, primer and paint.  The clapboards from the bottom to just below the windowsill are completely finished.  The trim by the downspout and the clapboards behind it are finished, too.  I managed to re-hang the downspout all by myself, which is a first.  (Usually, I start and fail, then call in help.)  My goal is to have as much of that yellow paint gone as I possibly can before I go back to work Saturday night.

So.  Worst first.  Triage the old girl.  Folks, she's gonna look worse before she looks better...