Painting Again

Saturday the 10^th started out fairly cool for July. Turning onto Lurleen Wallace Blvd from 11^th St I was following a pick-up truck packed with baskets of peaches. I followed it to the Farmers market which was in full swing at 6:00 a.m. Those Chilton County peaches were calling out to me. I bought a basket before he could get them unloaded!

The river was smooth as glass, a perfect morning for a row. I rowed bow seat/starboard: the first time I’ve rowed that side of the boat in a while. We did drills upstream, spun the boat and rowed alternating pairs and all four all the way back to the dock. By the half way point we began to get the boat set. This is the “sweet spot” when all is in synch and balanced. You can tell when you hit this as you can hear the boat skimming through the water. It almost sounds as if the boat is leaking…it’s a wonderful sound I don’t hear enough!

My latest project has been to finish up the painting on my front porch. Back in 2008 I finished stripping the paint off the bead board ceiling. That was a task that stretched out for months and cured me of wanting to strip paint for quite a spell.

Last summer I had a new front gutter installed. Before that was done I stripped the soffit which was the last of the wood to be stripped on my house. For over a year I looked at that stripped wood. I just could not get motivated to drag out the ladders and paint stuff again.

Monday morning July the 5^th I mailed out a letter to Louis. Returning from the post office I stopped to talk with Andre who was clearing out a neighbor’s garage. This neighbor is a hoarder and Andre has to put the trash to the curb when she is not home! There were two great metal shelves in the trash. I parked my bicycle home and returned on foot to carry the shelves across the street. They will be perfect to store my paint.

Organizing my house paint in the basement inspired me to get to work on the front porch again. Inspiration can come in the strangest ways!

Having a multicolour scheme on the house makes the task of painting a lot more difficult. Cutting in the different colours can be so time consuming. Painting is a job that really shows results. The days of grueling preparation work really don’t show much to the untrained eye.

There were three different colours to paint on the wood. A feature of Arts and Crafts houses is the exposed rafters: these I have painted in a “Kidskin Brown”, a shade I used for the trim on my first home. The underside of the roof decking is a dark green, and the rest is the main house colour, a “pumpkin yellow”.

With that task done I finally had to come to grips with what to do with the porch columns. These concrete porch columns are the “elephant in the room” for my house. They need to stand out, yet also blend in if that makes any sense. It is unusual for a Bungalow to have round columns. I’m thinking there was a builder here in Tuscaloosa at the time that did this style as a specialty. There are number of similar columns on old houses in my section of town.

Andrew Jackson Downing was instrumental in starting up the “Gothic Revival” movement back in the mid 1800’s. His philosophy on house colours was to use the shades prominent in nature. He believed the shades should blend like they do on a face. He hated the glaring white houses with green shutters so prominent at the time.

Using the nature theme I decided to do a “faux sandstone” finish on the columns. They were first primed and a base coat of white was applied. After years of seeing these columns peeling and shabby the base white was overpowering.

Applying the faux finish was real tedious work. You can only do a small area at a time. First a watered down base coat is applied. Then dabs of the house yellow and then gray was applied. Finally a wadded up newspaper was used to soften and blend the colours together.

The results justify the aggravation. Comparing the white to the faux finished column shows how the effect I tried for was achieved. I’m very happy with the result…..