Seeing Red

About mid-May I decided that the trim work on the house was in desperate need of a face lift. The shutters and front door had faded to a hue I like to call "the color formally known as red". It was a light red/orange color that spoke volumes about how long it had been since the last time it had been painted.

I turned to Mr. Crackers & declared, "This summer I am painting all of the trim on the house." He smiled and nodded somewhat distractedly since I had already made the declarations, "This summer I am repainting all the patio furniture." and "This summer I am painting the chiminea." about 2 weeks prior to this latest statement. Apparently I had big plans for a lot of outdoor projects this summer. Outdoor projects are usually the specialty of Mr. Crackers, but since I have yet to agree to his latest idea (a basketball court in the side yard that seems to me as if it will violate all sorts of property zoning laws), and we seem to be at a standstill on trying to find the right pickets to repair our fence, I guess the outdoor projects fall to me this year.

So, we chose a color and I got to work the week before Memorial Day. I figured since we had a lot of company coming over for a cook-out it was the perfect motivator to get all my projects done. In hindsight, I may have been crazy a little overly optimistic about my painting capabilities time-wise. The good news is that I did manage to get the front door finished before company came (even if the paint was still a bit tacky to the touch...)

But I can honestly say that none of the rest of my list of projects was completed. Nevertheless, I felt I had some momentum going, so I decided to tackle the patio furniture next. I had gotten most of the set painted (OK, so I still needed to finish a chair and a side table...and alright, if I'm honest the rest of the set really needed a second coat too) when Mr. Crackers took down all the shutters so I could paint those the following week.

So, I took a short break on my patio furniture painting project and switched gears. I got managed to get the first two shutters painted and then....

rain

and more rain

and yes, even more rain

and then vacation managed to slow me down a bit



In fact, the shutters sat for so long that birds did their business and the spiders built their webs on my newly painted shutters...before I even managed to get them re-hung on the house.

For those of you who can't tell, the freshly painted (yet bird stained) shutters are on the left. The faded and not yet painted shutters (also bird stained) are on the right. Trust me, in person the difference in the two colors is a little more dramatic.

So, feeling a bit behind I got back into the swing of things this week & actually managed to paint another couple of shutters...

So now I am officially half way done with the painting of the shutters. Yea!



I celebrated this accomplishment, but making yet another proclamation to Mr. Crackers, "This summer I am going to paint the back door!" Seriously, you can probably already guess the look I got when making this declaration, can't you?! And since I can't seem to have enough projects "in progress" I decided to go ahead and start painting the door too...



I had the red paint, so I figured why not? I'm not really sure how I feel about it yet. I've decided to finish painting it (are you laughing?) and then decide if I like it. If not, I figure I'll just re-paint it dark brown (now I'm sure you're laughing... is that an eye roll too?) so it will match the dark brown paint on the patio furniture (you know, once I actually get done painting the furniture ...).

I better get off the computer and head outside to paint another 2 shutters since Mr. Crackers has "Re-hang all shutters" on his to-do list this weekend. Nothing like a little pressure to get me to finally finish a project.