An Intimate Little Corner

I started Section One on Thursday after work. At the end of the day yesterday I thought I might be putting on primer tomorrow, so that wouldn’t too bad. That was until I started stripping the corner brackets today. I thought I wasn’t going to have to strip them, and that would have saved a lot of time. In the end though, I made the management decision to go ahead and strip them.

The corner boards leading up to the brackets were really bad. They had lots of flaking paint under the latex paint that was applied 6 years ago by the POs. I had to strip those back to bare wood just as I did the siding.

There’s just no excuse for this


When I got up to the brackets I noticed there were some really bad spots along with some good areas, but for the most part they could have gone either way. I started by just scrapping the bad areas, and one thing lead to another, and well, you know how it goes.

Oops


Hmmmm, straight grain redwood {drool}


The paint came off the siding pretty easily but it was still a lot of work. I think I spent maybe 6 or 7 hours total stripping the siding in this area. That’s not too bad. I almost took out the phone line when I removed the rain gutter. There were 5 brackets holding it on. I didn’t expect it to be very heavy. I mean, it’s just a hollow aluminum tube. The trouble was, it wasn’t hollow. The top 18-inches or so was completely clogged with weeds and shingle granules. I don’t think this thing has been draining water for a long time.

I undid the brackets half way and was trying to separate it in the middle to take it down. Suddenly the top-heavy top half let go and the whole thing flew off the house and landed on the phone line. In a way it was good because if it hadn’t landed on the phone line it would have probably bent and I would have had to replace it. As it was there was no harm done. I then decided to go up and clean out the gutter. Better to do it now than after I paint.

This is the second downspout on the house that I’ve found like this. The last one I cleaned out had a small tree growing in the downspout so it was easy to see there was a problem. That was when I first bought the house. This one didn’t have any real growth in it, jut lots of crude. There are 5 downspouts on the house. The one over the front porch wasn’t clogged. I inspected it last week when I was up on the roof. Another one I just installed last year when I removed the 2 story addition. That leaves the one of the south side. I don’t see any growth in it, but I now know that doesn’t mean anything. I’ll have to be sure to check it before winter arrives.

As I said, I thought I might be putting on primer on Monday. Now that I’ve included the brackets, and all the corner and window trim, I think I’m looking at Wednesday at the earliest. That’s ok, though. It was the right thing to do. If I can finish everything up by Friday that will leave me almost a week to do Section Two and still finish before my arbitrary deadline expires. Section Two has just two small walls with an inside corner, no windows, and almost no trim. Of course, I will have the spider infested tree to contend with. Should be fun.