House Painting: Volume 2

Saturday Ryan and I painting 3/4 of the house in about 11 hours. It was grueling and honestly one of the toughest things we have done in a while. I swear I cannot curl my left hand in a fist and it is Tuesday. As you can see in the pictures it was totally worth all the hard work. We had a Facebook poll and the two color choices were #1: Red Farmhouse and #2: Double Decker. The poll voting was fierce but in the end we sided with #1.We have brown trim and the darker red color of #1 played off well with that.

This is what our housed looked like after 30 years of neglect. The people that owned the home before us were strange to put it nicely. They did home renovations such as the kitchen that looked great but then never kept up keep on other parts of the home. The siding was a big issue and for a long time we did not know what to do with it either. After much research painting it was the best option for us. Friday we bought our paint and paint supplies and Saturday was go time.
We bought 5 gallons of paint and we may still need a little more to finish the front of the house. Once we use it all and are finish I will give you the final paint totals. So far we used 4 gallons on 3/4 of house. We also bought 2 large paint rollers (one with a fancy extension options) 1 small roller and paint brushes. I used a 2 inch, 3 inch and a 4 inch brush for trim work around windows. The best purchase we made was small hand held cups that had a magnet strip for your brush to stick to. Well worth the $3 price tag. For ladders we had a large ladder seen in the top picture, a standard ladder and a foot stool to do the work on the higher parts of the house.

 We decided to start painting the very back of the house first to make sure that we got our technique down by the time we got to the front of the house. I may have messed up right away and painted part of the soffit. Ryan was not happy and proceeded to make fun of me the rest of the day. This taught us to keep wet rags around to whip up mistakes on things that should not have paint on them. IE: electrical boxes and windows. On the back of the house we did use drop clothes to protect our patio. Sides of the house I could care less if the grass and dirt got paint on them.

One half of one side is almost finished here. The back of the house took us six hours to complete having to work around windows, power boxes and the deck.

 This side is all done looks great. When this was finished and we looked at it we knew we picked the right color.

 Other side by the deck finished! At this point my neighbors started coming over or shouting that they liked the color. I feel like some of them made up yard work to watch us all day. One of my neighbors was raking rocks in his yard.

 Let's talk a little about our time consuming painting technique. This is the side of the  house facing the road. With the painting we started with painting under each siding piece to get the underside where the rollers could not reach. We also painted around all windows and trim pieces by hand with brushes. This was a lot of time consuming work but was vital to the final long lasting work and look. Pictured here is Ryan hard at work.

Here is another picture of around the windows and some of the undersides painted by hand. You can see my favorite little red hand cup as mentioned above on the ground by my step ladder. This side of the house was what I like to call "thirsty". It soaked up the most paint versus the other sides of the house. The wood was rather dry and since it gets the most sun was really bleached.

Pictured above is the finished sides after 11 hours of painting. We were exhausted but really happy with the outcome. We have to still caulk the front of the house and paint it this week if the weather works with us. Not exactly looking promising for during the week. Hopefully this weekend. I also need to work on buying new lights for the front of the house and house numbers. I cannot wait for this project to be completed.

Until next time~
XoXo Emily