so we did paint it

if you're playing along, yes it has been a while since we've updated the blog. but good news, we've been busy doing stuff to the house. at least a little busy.

we painted the house. did we finish it? not quite, but we're pretty darn close. let me take you through the (painful) journey. we'll tie up loose ends when the weather picks up.

step one: sand and scrape (and replace some boards altogether). this involved some safety measures - i was really nervous about the potential for lead-based paint. we also draped tarps underneath us, to limit the amount of paint chips that hit the dirt.

step two: give the house a sponge bath.

step three: prime the bad boy. after determining that the pink paint was oil-based, we did some digging around to find out that we should use oil-based primer. p.s. oil-based paint stinks. bad. don't ask us why, but we thought it would be a good idea to prime it by hand, with a brush. we did two sides of the house this way, then caved and used a borrowed paint-sprayer. for some reason, we were afraid that a sprayer wasn't going to do a good job. not only did it do a good job, it saved us tons of time. the only pain was cleaning the oil-based paint out of the sprayer.

the white paint made a huge difference. yeah, it stayed this way for a little while. we kind of enjoyed the clean crisp look of the white.

step four: paint! we sprayed on three coats of a matched version of yolo colorhouse's desert 6. we got it matched at home depot with some low VOC paint. yeah, we couldn't quite splurge for the yolo, but went with them on the interior paint. high quality stuff, it just got too pricey at the 15-gallon range.

step five: ugh, the trim. after we painted the body of the house with the actual color, the window casings looked terrible - almost like they'd been graffitied. painting the white trim was relatively easy. the inner accent that we decided on was another story - it took a little getting used to, but we really like it - it's a reddish-orange (martha stewart's saffron, via home depot). you can faintly see it in the photo below.

we hosted a block party - our lovely neighbors have given

our house and yard work so many fantastic compliments.

what's left? the pink triangle above the bay windows. yeah, we couldn't quite reach it and never finalized our plan of attack. we're thinking new cedar shingles, but not sure if we should leave 'em natural or paint them.