GroupWBench

…You have to do something else first. It is funny how jobs seem to snowball.

That little truism reared its ugly head on us this last week. We got to talking about how the exterior of the house needed to be painted. Our friend Gene has a painting business and we know he'll do a good job for us. So we started looking hard at paint colors. Once we found them, we realized that our porch railings would need some work. We decided to do something a little less boring with them than the straight pickets that had been there for the life of the house. We would need to do that before we had the painters come.

 
We decided to start with the back porch so that if we screwed it all up we wouldn't be advertising it for all the world to see. Unleashing the mighty sawsall, we attacked the porch railings and had them removed without too much problem.

At that point, Ivy and I stood back and realized how nice it would be to have a deck coming off that little porch. It would be shaded in the afternoon and it would cover up the patch of dirt where the dogs and the ongoing drought and heat has killed off most of the grass. We looked at each other, both afraid to be the first to voice what would turn into another big backbreaking job. I don't know who broke first, but we did decide that a deck would be nice.

That was where we scratched our heads and tried to figure out whether to start operation Build-A-Deck or to switch to the front porch and start Operation Porch Railing II. We knew exactly we needed to do for the deck and Ivy hates having lots of projects underway and none finished, so the logical thing would be to start in on the deck. Of course, that is when we went with the front porch plan and started a whole new project on top of the back porch/deck one. The step off in the back is low enough and the dogs don't mind it being unfinished.

Ivy had found a bunch of nice ideas online, but we really hadn't decided exactly what we were going to do with the railing to make it a bit nicer. I was looking around at the things she found and tripped across a neat item that would spice up the porch rails without needing to remove and rebuild the whole thing. We ordered it and the world surprised us by getting it to us within a few days. I was highly suspicious. Whenever the world does something good, it seems to be just setting you up for the slap down. Fortunately, the slap down hasn't arrived quite yet.

Looking at our railings, we realized we needed to repaint them before we could start putting the insert we ordered into the railing. Breaking out the sanders, we erased the battle scars left by the Texas sun on the porch railing. But that wasn't enough. There was still some loose paint and there were lots of hard to get to spots. We broke down and bought a power washer to blast off any other loose paint and to just clean the darn thing. It worked a charm. Now all we needed to make the front porch look just right would be an old Chevy on blocks and a light scattering of empty beer cans.

Time to start making it look a bit better. We cut out about eight rails and slipped the insert in.

Now it was time to paint. We ran out and bought paint in the new trim color and in the new color for the door. That is when I found out that we needed a special acrylic paint for the insert. At $165 per gallon it doubled the cost of getting the insert. We only needed about a pint to paint it. Hopefully we can find additional uses for the left over.

Ivy painted the railings while I took the insert to the shop and hung it off the garage door for spray painting. With my compressor and the spray nozzles, I could put a much cleaner coat of paint on all of those little angles and nooks. Fortunately, the paint sprayed well without needing to be thinned. I helped Ivy finish up painting railings while the insert dried. I grabbed the insert and remounted it.

We still need to do a little touch up, but it looks like rain for the next few days. I guess that means I have time to plan what materials we need to slap a nice floating deck out back. We were looking at our work today and I almost forgot that before we started Porch Rail I, Porch Rail II, and New Back Deck, our original goal was Operation Paint the House. We need to get our friend Gene to come over and tell us what else we need to do before we can actually start that project. Oh yeah, I was going to paint the front door…which reminds me that the back door needs some paint and clean up, and the shop door could use some trim paint. Ooh…as long as we are making a nice deck out back, wouldn't it be nice to have a little stock tank pool to float in on a hot summer evening?

I'm sure that before we can start on any of that, there will be something else we have to do first.  We know the slap down will catch us sooner than later but for now we are just enjoying the new view from the dining room window.