Saturday, July 04, 2009

With pen in hand


I write to you my dear gentle readers to share a story of three men, some ladders, a mini pickup truck, and several buckets of paint.

They arrived on Monday morning, shortly after I got to work. While I toiled away at making a brand new piece of instrumentation made largely of aluminum, the began the awesome transformation of our 60 year-old house made largely out of wood.

In the twenty-year span since our house had been painted it had become really shabby looking. In places, the paint was peeling off, not just a little here and there you see, but in great large areas. It was noticeable to even the casual noticer. It was, my friends, an abomination before men.

Now in addition to the condition of the paint, there was the color. The last color selection was done by my beloved mother-in-law. Her tastes are more traditional than my dear wife's. (Sharon's more avant gardé color palette was but one of the several reasons that I proposed to her, and not her mother.) Thus the muted blue-gray with darker gray trim was termed "boring" and "ugly" and a flock of other pejorative adjectives - sometimes in thrilling combinations with modifiers like "butt-ugly" (my personal favorite) thrown in for good measure. I, the dutiful colorblind husband, wholeheartedly agreed.

Thus the search began for just the right color combination. We have been discussing this (rather Sharon has asked me about my opinion of various colors to which I have always replied, "It doesn't matter to me, Honey.") for literally several years now.

Back to Monday morning...

Having hired out several of the huge jobs - roofing, exterior painting, obstetrics - it never ceases to blow me away how much work you can get done in a week if there are several of you (or ten of you) and you don't live at the house and therefore aren't subject to requirements of sleeping in, putting away laundry, filling/emptying the dishwasher, fiddling with the pool, or any of those other things that distract me when I am working up the gumption to actually get started on a big job. (Sorry about the run-on sentence there.)

In five days, these three guys got as much done as it would have taken me 15 days to finish. Amazing. They'll be back on Monday and probably Tuesday too to finish up the trim. Seven days for them would have been an entire month for me. I have a lot of vacation time, but not that much.

You can see the view from the pool in the picture at the top there. It's fuckingorgeous. (Try and just look at the house, not the towels hanging off the fence.)

3 comments:

Little Miss Drama Pants said...

It looks fabulous!

Pamela said...

I haven't seen it in person yet but I bet the front will look especially nice peeking boldly out from all your greenery.

E. Waterman said...

I find it quite appealing to my artsy eyeballs.

I never did notice the color before, since i swear the only other times ive been back there it has been night!