Summertime Fun

It’s officially Summertime and that means it’s time for more sexual innuendos and suggestive metaphors relating to removing paint from wood. So in that vein, I’ll say that today I took all my clothes off and performed lewd and lascivious acts on the front porch and in front of all the neighbors. No, wait, that doesn’t quite convey the same idea, does it?

Of course, what I’m trying to say is that I stripped on the front porch….uh, stripped paint from wood. I removed paint from the wooden fluted columns that flank the front porch by means of a heat gun, scraper, and sander. There I said it.

The more work I do on the porch, the more work there seems to be left to do. That sort of sounds like a bad dream doesn’t it, but that’s the way it feels. The higher I got up on the columns today the closer I got to the higher points on the porch, and the more I could see that I have a lot more work to do up there. I’m also spending more time on the columns themselves than I thought I would need to. I think it could have 2 more weeks worth of work on this porch.

When the house was painted by the POs about 6 years ago the people who painted it did a really bad job. They just painted over scaling, flaking paint on the columns. It seems the logic behind it was, “If we put enough paint on it, no one will know”.

One of the benefits to taking all the paint off is I’ve found out the wood on the columns is in better shape that I could have hoped for. With the exception of the rot down at the last few inches of the one column that sank down in to the porch, the rest of the wood solid and hard.

Here’s a before and after picture. It’s really from two different columns because I didn’t take a before picture of the column I stripped today. Really, though, it doesn’t matter because they just pretty much range from bad to worse in terms of the condition of the paint. This "before" picture is about average.