Happy Shiny People

My husband showed our daughter the happy face I painted on the side of the house and said "Mamma's happy face". To an almost 2-year old that means every happy face is Mamma. We were at Jerry's Deli and P started saying "Mamma!, Mamma!" and pointing at the sign above the door.

I'm not minding the association one bit.

Week Three

I was so exhausted from last weekend I didn't get to update the blog.

Friday, we got scaffolding and set it up.

Saturday, Hubby had to work half day so I only had a few hours to continue stripping and taking off rotted portions of beams. I made great progress. One poor beam look like a nub it was so bad.

Sunday we were at Home Depot for 3 hours with our toddler. OMG! What a juggle! The idea was to get all our supplies in one trip and with one purchase. Our Home Depot card lets us pay off any purchase over $300, without interest, for a year. Funny, we were worried we wouldn't get to $300...we spent $600.

After Home Depot and after getting P down for a nap, Hubby went to work on the window moulding. We decided for most windows the top and side pieces of wood were ok. It's the bottom piece/pieces that are rotted.

Upon further inspection we realized pulling out any moulding was more intricate than expected. The bottom consists of three pieces and it looks like originally there was a fourth, which is now missing. One piece the Hubby pulled off wasn't just a square piece of wood. It had a special cut, a wedge, on one end that was made to slide into the interior window hole. Basically, the entire configuration is one big jig saw puzzle meant to support each piece around it solidly. The construction of this thing is amazing....but impossible to replace easily. We're now just trying to protect the wood that's there. While trying to put a piece of moulding back in place Hubby cracked a window! At this point less is more...ie, the less we do the more we'll keep.

The rains came on Tuesday this past week. We had to tarp the side of the house to protect the sanded wood from getting wet. Now, this weekend, it's 95 degrees, sunny and dry but Hubby had to work the entire weekend so we are on hold.

The rains and cold made for some pretty dramatic pictures of our hood. This is the view from our bedroom window. Because of the fog you can really see highlights of our neighborhood. On the far left two tall palm trees stand, hence the name of our community, Corbin Palms. On the right the play structure of our school and soon to be community park.

Takes One to know One

While I was out stripping wood my hubby was on the computer. I left this blog open on the screen. When he sat down he thought it was a page I had left open for research solutions to rotting beams. He looked at the pictures and thought "wow, those people have ugly wood!" and as soon as he had the thought he realized it was his own house he was looking at! We both laughed so hard when he told me. At least we're doing something about our ugly wood.

At it again.

I'm about to start working on the beams again. Hubby is back from having to work on a Saturday. P is asleep.....all systems are go. I'd rather be sitting here typing.

Our signs

We recently had asbestos taken out of our crawl space where the air ducts are housed. The guys covered up the crawl space with a used piece of wood with what we thought was random paint spray on it. We are going to paint the board white so we didn't care what was on it.... until we looked back at our house from across the street. The spray kinda looked like a swastika. Our thoughts were confirmed when the neighbors commented on it.

I took care of that "Nazi" issue this weekend. The whole thing will be repainted in two weeks.

Beams, beams are good for.....

Our project this weekend (and for the next two weekends) is to "Krisel keep" our beams. The main posts/beams to our house are rotting on the outside. My husband noticed it while lying in bed admiring our house's windows one day. It's suppose to be an "El Nino" winter, which means a lot of rain, so we have to get on this project now while its dry and cooler.

The game plan is to/was to: pressure wash the beams and windows, strip all wood facing south, sand, repair beams, change rotted window molding, prime, paint and wa-la! Ah, it's never that easy.

During the pressure wash the stucco on the south wall started coming off easier than expected. I think we will want to finish scraping that wall clean. (add it to the list) That made me want to test the nearby garage wall that now has no stucco but does have an old coat of paint. Paint came off sort of easy. Now, I know I'll have to rent a professional pressure washer to do the entire house after we take the stucco off and before painting. (add that to the list)

Contrary to my memory, stripping the paint was not/is not easy. I use to refinish furniture in high school and I remember stripping pieces with 4-5 coats of paint and it was never this hard. I think strippers today are weaker than 20 years ago. As long as you left the stripper on for an hour the paint scrapped right off. Not so now.

I bought two different products at Home Depot. Jasco was a better buy but the trick is to slather it on, wait less than 15 minutes (contrary to instructions). As soon as you see the paint start to bubble, start scrapping. If the stripper dries it's too hard to scrape off. AND, it DOES NOT take off more than one coast of paint at a time! I looked at two other methods/products I found on This Old House.com but neither were available at Home Depot or Lowes.

This stripper from Home Depot is not worth the money.

This is the better buy. Not that great tho, in my opinion.

If you've tried using RemovAll or the Silent Paint Stripper I'd love to know how it worked. Next go around at this I'm renting the Silent Paint Stripper. It seems to the easiest and safest method with old lead paint....which I think we have and I'm sure I breathed in yesterday.

Next weekend we need to finish stripping and sanding. I thought we were going to be done with this phase. We still have more to do because the middle of the house is too high for my husband and I to safely reach. We should have rented scaffolding and we probably would have been further along. Half the battle was being in a safe position to muscle the scrapping.

I'm also looking at the best options for protecting and repairing the beams. So far these are a few articles I've found on This Old House.com:

Porch Column Rot

How to Repair Rotted Trim with Epoxy

Here's our rotting situation.