Today - day 4 of our "summer vacation" - we have accomplished a few things. Our wrought iron railing is finally done! We used the directions from here, or rather, I printed the directions from there and handed them to my parents (I could get used to this broken arm thing). One thing I do not recommend is sanding all of the old paint and rust off and "getting some shut eye" before painting the enamel on. It stormed that night. And guess what happens to unprotected iron after a storm? It rusts. So we had to begin all over again. But the final product is decent. I hope it stays that way for a long time.
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Otherwise, the rest of today was dedicated to one thing - painting the deck. It took us a full 8 hours, even with two people working all day. The heat index today was 106 degrees, and the humidity was so high that most of my pictures were fuzzy from the condensation on my camera lens. Everyone is exhausted, except Lucy.
Tomorrow is our last day with Brian here, and we're planning on using his expertise in every possible way. He's going to build our deck stairs, install a new screen door, and teach us how to sand and stain the deck. In his "down time" (a.k.a. time in the air conditioning) he's going to teach me how to remove wall paper and linoleum from the laundry room. We can get this all done in the 5 hours he has before he has to go to the airport, right?
I'm having flashbacks of our April reading your blog. I might have to stop. On the good side, we just gathered enough money for our roof that has been steadily leaking since we were at the spend-all-our-time-and-$$-at-Home-Depot-and-yes-the-staff-know-us-by-name phase. But it's going to be great, Kristin! And one day you, like me now, will be sitting in a room that's a disaster with laundry and kid-mess instead of plaster dust! Love you!
ReplyDeleteBeth Galik