Sat am we walked to breakfast at Bumblekiss on Fremont and sat on their patio and enjoyed a yummy breakfast with perfect weather. On the way home, I picked up this ~14"x14" decorative grate for $.50 at a garage sale we happened upon and plan to nail it up on our backyard fence sometime soon-that fence is hideous so can use any help.
Steve and I spent a couple hours working on the back of the house. The lapboard siding paint has flaked horribly-we think it is do to the wood sitting for several months without being painted (we stripped the paint 4 years ago in the spring but did not get it painted until early fall) and getting tons of sun and heat during the long summer days. The shingles part of the siding is just fine. We are trying to re-prep it for a new coat of paint by the end of the summer. We also used flat paint on the siding which is probably contributing to the demise of it.
Steve stripped (with a heat gun). scraped the paint with a 4" scraper and sanded (combo of 60 grit paper and orbital sander) the chipping paint while I glued back together some of the boards that have splintered badly.
The splintered boards were previously covered be a HUGE (and that is an understatement) deck built by the previous home owners that stretched the width of the house and covered 2/3 of the backyard, making a less of 10' area of useable ground. We hated it being that a. it was ugle b. it was up high so you felt like you were on a perch and anyone walking on the street behind could see you c. we had virtually no grass d. it was ugly. I digress. Steve uncovered the lowest two boards a couple years back in a frantic rage of needed to deconstruct something mindlessly. While this can be good and has led to our awesome brick patio, it has left ugly siding and a truly hideous deck. Anyways, hoping to have the siding prettier by the end of the summer.
For gluing, I used a very scientific method to get out the slightly hardened (yet new unopened bottle) of Gorilla glue, the I wet the wood I wanted to glue per the directions, squeezed glue onto nail using scientific method and smeared on wood. The we pushed wood together by either nailing below using a finish nail (easy to go back and patch as most areas glued would not accept a clamp) or clamped the wood. Last I scraped off the extra glue using some old cardboard and then we waited for the magic to happen.
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| used a dental pic (from the Hoard which Steve's dad used for model planes) to take out any extra paint flakes in the cracks; monitor is vital as the babe was sleeping and we were takin advantage of the precious time sans babe |
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| think it needs help? Think there used to be stairs here? |
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| scientific method |
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| spreading glue-this is actually time consuming |
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| removing extra glue to cut down on sanding |
Somehow it makes me feel better to know we weren't the only ones scraping paint this weekend.
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