Painting the House

I must tell all of you right now that if you decide to paint your own house, DON"T! Call out a contractor. We decided it wouldn't be such a big deal, so two weeks ago, we began the prepping process & we are still in the prepping stage. It is NOT fun! Here is the front upper part of our house and you can see where the paint has been scraped off. The part of the house you see on the left a bit was an add on, so that paint isn't bad and remained intact.

So, first you pressure wash with a combination of moss & algae remover, bleach and TSP & wait 10 minutes than rinse the house. Some of the really loose stuff comes off during this stage. Then you being the scraping which you think isn't bad UNTIL YOU START....it is never ending -or- it just seems that way!

Here is the view of the north side of our house and you can see where entire strips have come off. The 2 darker spots are where we initially tested paint to see if we liked the colors. But after realizing everyone around us seems to paint their home some type of gray, we decided against it.
So, here you can see more scraping. The taller ladder is the one my husband uses, and the shorter on in the front of the picture is the one I use & yes, I stand on it with my air boot.

So, yesterday was more scraping and then comes the sanding & we did that all day yesterday with the final rinse coming last night. Here is a shot of hubby as he is getting ready to go up even the taller ladder. Which incidentally, he jumped off yesterday as it was beginning to fall and put his arm up just as it landed on him. We were blessed, he didn't even get a scratch.

Now, remember that we live in Washington state on the coast and very near the rain forest, so while Seattle is having wonderfully warm or hot weather in the near 90's, we remain tolerantly cool. Also, August is usually our driest month and that is why hubby took so much time off.

The worst part of this is that my hubby is also a weather watcher, so he is in a huge panic that it is going to rain before we finish the house. Not to mention the north side of our home NEVER, EVER, EVER gets sun on it. It is blocked out by the neighbors house, so it is still damp from last nights final hose down.

Here is a bit more of the house on the north side so you can see it has been almost entirely scraped clean. This is the side that does get some sun when we are blessed with it!

We suspect that the previous owner who had rented the house house prior to selling it, just slapped the cheapest paint he could find on the house and did not prep work what so ever, so we are stuck with it all.

Funny though, I have seen 3 homes in just the last week alone in our area being painted by the professionals and all they did was wash these homes down, not one of them scraped a stitch of paint off.

Hubby is worried that the paint won't have time to dry if it starts to rain. I told him to paint the covered porch first and then do the dry spots. If it has to wait until next spring we will just put primer on it and let it sit.

So, how has your week-end been?